Michael P. Gallaher

Modeling the Impact of Technical Change on Emissions Abatement Investments in Developing Countries

The cost of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation over time depends on both the rate of technical change in leading-edge technologies and the diffusion of knowledge and capabilities throughout international markets. This paper presents a framework developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and RTI International (RTI) for incorporating technical change in non-CO2 GHG mitigation projections over time. An engineering (bottom-up) approach is used to model technical change as a set of price and productivity factors that change over time as a function of technology advances and the location of developing countries relative to the technology efficiency frontier. S-shaped diffusion curves are generated, which demonstrate the maturity of the market for a given technology in a given region. The framework is demonstrated for coal mine methane mitigation technologies in the United States and China, but it is applicable for the full range of technology adoption issues.

Public Investments in Energy Technology

Escalating energy demand may be the most important issue facing the United States and the world today. There is little disagreement that research and development (RD however, there is less agreement over the specific research agenda to be pursued and how that agenda is funded. This book addresses the social importance of new energy technologies, illustrates policy-relevant applications of evaluation techniques and proposes new perspectives for a US energy investment strategy.

Complex standards and innovation in the digital economy: the Internet Protocol

As Web-based services evolve from a medium for data exchange to a system for managing geographically-dispersed work flows, the complexity of the supporting infrastructure is increasing along with the sophistication of the actual services. This paper presents a case study of the global transition to IPv6 to illustrate the importance of a standards infrastructure in the evolution of internet-based services across the global economy and the consequent strategic and policy issues facing industry and government. Industry cost data are presented and a model is proposed to explicitly represent the role of standards in the innovation process and illuminate private sector investment risks.

Estimating avoided environmental emissions and environmental health benefits

As this volume demonstrates, a wide variety of methodologies exist to evaluate particularly the objectives and outcomes of research and development programs. These include surveys, statistical and econometric estimations, patent analyses, bibliometrics, scientometrics, network analyses, case studies, and historical tracings. Contributors divide these and other methods and applications into four categories – economic, non-economic, hybrid and data-driven – in order to discuss the many factors that affect the utility of each technique and how that impacts the technological, economic and societal forecasts of the programs in question.