The evolution of electricity demand and the role for demand side participation, in buildings and transport

This paper explores the possible evolution of UK electricity demand as we move along three potential transition pathways to a low carbon economy in 2050.The shift away from fossil fuels through the electrification of demand is discussed, particularly through the uptake of heat pumps and electric vehicles in the domestic and passenger transport sectors. Developments in the way people and institutions may use energy along each of the pathways are also considered and provide a rationale for the quantification of future annual electricity demands in various broad sectors. The paper then presents detailed modelling of hourly balancing of these demands in the context of potential low carbon generation mixes associated with the three pathways. In all cases, hourly balancing is shown to be a significant challenge. To minimise the need for conventional generation to operate with very low capacity factors, a variety of demand side participation measures are modelled and shown to provide significant benefits. Lastly, projections of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK and the imports of fossil fuels to the UK for each of the three pathways are presented.

Towards a theoretical framework for creative participation : how personal characteristics influence employees' willingness to contribute ideas

To retain competitiveness, succeed and flourish, organizations are forced to continuously innovate. This drive for innovation is not solely limited to product/process innovation but more profoundly relates to a continuous process of improving how organizations work internally, requiring a constant stream of ideas and suggestions from motivated employees. In this chapter we investigate some recent developments and propose a conceptual framework for creative participation as a personality driven interface between creativity and innovation. Under the assumption that employees’ intrinsic willingness to contribute novel ideas and solutions requires a set of personal characteristics and necessary skill that might well be unique to each organizational unit, the chapter then explores personal characteristics associated with creativity, innovation and innovative behavior. Various studies on the correlation between creativity and personality types are also reviewed. The chapter provides a discussion of solutions and future development together with recommendations for the future research.

Creative participation in construction firms: bridging creativity and innovation

An intricate evolution of mainstream theories follows the growing need to explain employees’ commitment and engagement. Our understanding of these work-related phenomena and behaviour has improved but creativity and innovation as desired indicators are still often treated as coexisting constructs with very little attention given to a state of willingness of an individual to even consider contributing ideas. In this research we investigate the influence of knowledge and understanding, perceived radicality, personality dimensions, and favouring of ideas on employee willingness to creatively participate in order to trace its existence in propagation of ideas. A total of 76 construction and non-construction professionals participated in between-subject quasi-experiments. We also proposed IPO-based radicality of ideas construct from the viewpoint of employees involved in the processes of transformation. The research findings show that experts with deep understanding of the work are more likely to contribute highly radical ideas to decision-makers than less knowledgeable employees. Furthermore, personal factors that impact employee willingness to creatively participate have been valued higher than organisational factors. Personality dimensions by The BigFive Inventory have shown no effect on willingness to contribute ideas, while favouring of ideas showed a significant effect. In general, the findings show similarities with some studies of consumer willingness to participate in co-creation processes and thus indicate that firms may be studied as dynamic internal markets of ideas.

Crossbred cow adoption and milk market participation in a multivariate count data framework

Cross-bred cow adoption is an important and potent policy variable precipitating subsistence household entry into emerging milk markets. This paper focuses on the problem of designing policies that encourage and sustain milkmarket expansion among a sample of subsistence households in the Ethiopian highlands. In this context it is desirable to measure households’ ‘proximity’ to market in terms of the level of deficiency of essential inputs. This problem is compounded by four factors. One is the existence of cross-bred cow numbers (count data) as an important, endogenous decision by the household; second is the lack of a multivariate generalization of the Poisson regression model; third is the censored nature of the milk sales data (sales from non-participating households are, essentially, censored at zero); and fourth is an important simultaneity that exists between the decision to adopt a cross-bred cow, the decision about how much milk to produce, the decision about how much milk to consume and the decision to market that milk which is produced but not consumed internally by the household. Routine application of Gibbs sampling and data augmentation overcome these problems in a relatively straightforward manner. We model the count data from two sites close to Addis Ababa in a latent, categorical-variable setting with known bin boundaries. The single-equation model is then extended to a multivariate system that accommodates the covariance between crossbred-cow adoption, milk-output, and milk-sales equations. The latent-variable procedure proves tractable in extension to the multivariate setting and provides important information for policy formation in emerging-market settings

Tobit estiamtion with unknown point of censoring with an application to milk market participation in the Ethiopian highlands

Data augmentation is a powerful technique for estimating models with latent or missing data, but applications in agricultural economics have thus far been few. This paper showcases the technique in an application to data on milk market participation in the Ethiopian highlands. There, a key impediment to economic development is an apparently low rate of market participation. Consequently, economic interest centers on the “locations” of nonparticipants in relation to the market and their “reservation values” across covariates. These quantities are of policy interest because they provide measures of the additional inputs necessary in order for nonparticipants to enter the market. One quantity of primary interest is the minimum amount of surplus milk (the “minimum efficient scale of operations”) that the household must acquire before market participation becomes feasible. We estimate this quantity through routine application of data augmentation and Gibbs sampling applied to a random-censored Tobit regression. Incorporating random censoring affects markedly the marketable-surplus requirements of the household, but only slightly the covariates requirements estimates and, generally, leads to more plausible policy estimates than the estimates obtained from the zero-censored formulation

Social divisions in school participation and attainment in India: 1983-2004

This study documents the size and nature of “Hindu-Muslim” and “boy-girl” gaps in children’s school participation and attainments in India. Individual-level data from two successive rounds of the National Sample Survey suggest that considerable progress has been made in decreasing the Hindu-Muslim gap. Nonetheless, the gap remains sizable even after controlling for numerous socio-economic and parental covariates, and the Muslim educational disadvantage in India today is greater than that experienced by girls and Scheduled Caste Hindu children. A gender gap still appears within as well as between communities, though it is smaller within Muslim communities. While differences in gender and other demographic and socio-economic covariates have recently become more important in explaining the Hindu-Muslim gap, those differences altogether explain only 25 percent to 45 percent of the observed schooling gap.

Participation in Higher Education: aspirations, attainment and social background

The recent report of the Milburn Review into Social Mobility highlights the under-representation of young people from lower socio-economic groups in higher education and encourages universities and others to act to remedy this situation as a contribution to greater social mobility. The paper uses data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England to examine the relationship between social background, attainment and university participation. The results show that differences in school-level attainment associated with social background are by far the most important explanation for social background differences in university attendance. However, there remains a small proportion of the participation gap that is not accounted for by attainment. It is also the case that early intentions for higher education participation are highly predictive of actual participation. The results suggest that although there may be some scope for universities to act to improve participation by people from less advantaged backgrounds, a much more important focus of action is on improving the school-level achievement of these students.

‘Due libertie and proportiond equalitie’: Milton, democracy, and the republican tradition

John Milton’s political thought has been interpreted in strikingly divergent ways. This article argues that he should be seen as a classical republican, and locates key aspects of his political thought within an ancient Greek discourse critical of democracy or extreme democracy. Milton was clearly familiar with the ancient texts expounding this critique, and he himself deployed both the arguments and the characteristic discourse of the anti-democratic thinkers across the span of his writing. This vision of politics emphasized the rightly-ordered soul of the masculine republican citizen, in contrast to the unruly passions seen both in tyrants and in the democratic rabble.

The persistent challenge of encouraging public participation in the low-carbon transition

In order to address the growing urgency of issues around environmental and resource limits, there is a clear need to develop policies that promote changes in behavior and the ways in which society both views and consumes goods and services. However, there is an argument to suggest that, in order to develop effective policies in this area, we need to move beyond a narrow understanding of ‘how individuals behave’ in order to cultivate a more nuanced approach that encompasses behavioral influences in different societies, contexts and settings. In this opinion article we therefore draw on a range of our own recent comparative research studies in order to provide fresh insights into the continued problem of how to engage people individually and collectively in establishing more sustainable, low-carbon societies.