Ming-Chung Chang

DECISION MAKING ON STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGY LICENSING: FIXED-FEE VERSUS ROYALTY LICENSING METHODS

Because of a deterioration in the quality of the environment, this paper studies the effects of the environment and the economy on environmental technology licensing in a homogeneous Cournot duopoly model in order to reduce environmental pollution and hence improve social welfare. To this end, two licensing methods — namely, a fixed-fee licensing method and a royalty licensing method — are compared. It is found that a high emission tax rate induces the innovator to not license the environmental technology to the licensee under the fixed-fee licensing method. As for social welfare, a large innovation scale of environmental technology does not guarantee that social welfare will be maximized. Finally, a large innovation scale of environmental technology is likely to increase consumer surplus if the marginal environmental damage is significant. Consumers are likely to prefer royalty licensing to fixed-fee licensing. This conclusion differs from Wangs finding in 2002.

Inconsistent preferences in environmental protection investment and the central government's optimal policy

Environmental protection plans cannot succeed without full cooperation among related units. However, inconsistent investment preferences toward environmental protection increase the damage to the environment. This article employs the contract mechanism to analyse environmental protection effects when the central government directly subsidizes the local governments. The results reveal that subsidies from the central government are not only unable to solve the problem of the inconsistent investment preferences among the central and local governments but also induce the free-riding behaviour of local governments. Because of the free-riding behaviour of the local governments, there is no such equilibrium in which the central government prefers the sequential investment mode while the local governments prefer the simultaneous investment mode.

Disaggregate energy efficiency of regions in Taiwan

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore Taiwan’s regional energy efficiency trend and complement the work of the total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) index proposed by Hu and Wang (2006). It further extends panel data stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) modeling for estimating disaggregate energy efficiency. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies the panel data stochastic production frontier to estimate the TFEE scores for 20 administrative regions in Taiwan over the period 2004-2015. The SFA models include five inputs (employed population, amount of productive electricity power consumed, amount of electricity consumed for household and non-household electric lighting, amount of gasoline sales, and amount of diesel sales) and one output (total real income in the base year of 2011). Findings This research concludes with three main findings: the inefficient administrative regions of Taiwan include mostly large industrial parks and the petrochemical industry cluster; the top five administrative regions with inefficient diesel use are mostly metropolitan areas that the concern of air pollution caused by diesel system arouses the awareness to use less diesel fuel; and the average TFEE score on household and non-household electric lighting is higher than the usage efficiency of productive electricity power, gasoline, and diesel, but there is still room for efficiency improvement. Originality/value Most administrative regions in Taiwan are not efficient in almost all kinds of energy use. The results show that the efficiencies of using productive electricity power, gasoline, and diesel need to be improved a lot more.

Environmental Technology Licensing Under Emission-Equivalent Environmental Taxes and Standards

We use a two-stage game with an outsider patentee and n homogeneous firms to study the effects of environmental taxes and standards under an equivalent emission on environmental technology licensing behavior. Counter to the intuition, a stricter environmental policy hinders technology licensing since a stricter environmental regulation weakens the licensees payment ability. When the innovation size is small, there exists a preference inconsistency on the environmental instrument between the government and the patentee. The patent owner has a higher incentive to license under an environmental standard than under an emission tax with an equivalent emission amount.