Christa D. Jensen

Incorporating Jurisdiction Issues into Regional Carbon Accounts under Production and Consumption Accounting Principles

Despite increased public interest, policy makers have been slow to enact targets based on limiting emissions under full consumption accounting measures (such as carbon footprints). We argue that this may be due to the fact that policy makers in one jurisdiction do not have control over production technologies used in other jurisdictions. We use a regional input–output framework and data derived on carbon dioxide emissions by industry (and households) to examine regional accountability for emissions generation. In so doing, we consider two accounting methods which permit greater accountability of regional private and public (household and government) final consumption as the main driver of regional emissions generation, while retaining focus on the local production technology and consumption decisions which fall under the jurisdiction of regional policy makers. We propose that these methods permit an attribution of emissions generation that is likely to be of more use than a full global footprint analysis to regional policy makers.

A Baseline Input—Output Model with Environmental Accounts (IOEA) Applied to E-Waste Recycling:

This article reports the authors’ efforts to construct a baseline input—output (IO) model with environmental accounts for use in modeling geographically specific e-waste recycling systems. The authors address conceptual and practical issues that arise when recyclable end-of-life (EOL) commodities and related activities are incorporated into the traditional IO model including: (1) shortcomings of existing industry and commodity accounts that do not explicitly represent recycling activities and recyclable EOL products; (2) accounting challenges related to flows of EOL products observed mainly in physical volumes; and (3) valuing EOL products whose transactions prices vary widely. These three issues complicate the incorporation of EOL commodities within the conventional IO framework. The authors present a way to record the transactions of EOL products in both physical and monetary terms in an IO model with environmental accounts. Specifically, the authors present the case of e-waste recycling for the Atlanta metropolitan area (AMA) with an empirically based hypothetical scenario.

The Integration of Periodic Markets in Mayan Guatemala: A Gravity Approach

Mayan towns in the Guatemalan highlands hold markets on specific days of the week. A market is attended by local townspeople, by peasants residing in the town’s hinterland, and by vendors bringing wares from other towns. A market functions to bring in goods from other ecological zones, to bring in goods from higher order centers, and to sell surpluses of locally produced goods. To understand how these markets are integrated, we develop a gravity model, examining the flow of vendors from 85 towns of residence to 15 market towns. In our model, the flow of vendors from one town to another is a function not only of physical distance, but of ecological complementarities, of linguistic differences, of road access, and of demographic endowments.