Walter Gómez

Controlling Urban Air Pollution Caused by Households: Uncertainty, Prices, and Income

We examine the control of air pollution caused by households burning wood for heating and cooking in the developing world. Since the problem is one of controlling emissions from nonpoint sources, regulations are likely to be directed at household choices of wood consumption and combustion technologies. Moreover, these choices are subtractions from, or contributions to, the pure public good of air quality. Consequently, the efficient policy design is not independent of the distribution of household income. Since it is unrealistic to assume that environmental authorities can make lump sum income transfers part of control policies, efficient control of air pollution caused by wood consumption entails a higher tax on wood consumption and a higher subsidy for more efficient combustion technologies for higher income households. Among other difficulties, implementing a policy to promote the adoption of cleaner combustion technologies must overcome the seemingly paradoxical result that efficient control calls for higher technology subsidies for higher income households.

Using stated preference methods to design cost-effective subsidy programs to induce technology adoption: An application to a stove program in southern Chile

We study the design of an economic incentive based program - a subsidy - to induce adoption of more efficient technology in a pollution reduction program in southern Chile. Stated preferences methods, contingent valuation (CV), and choice experiment (CE) are used to estimate the probability of adoption and the willingness to share the cost of a new technology by a household. The cost-effectiveness property of different subsidy schemes is explored numerically for different regulatory objectives. Our results suggest that households are willing to participate in voluntary programs and to contribute by paying a share of the cost of adopting more efficient technologies. We find that attributes of the existing and the new technology, beyond the price, are relevant determinant factors of the participation decision and payment. Limited access to credit markets for low income families can be a major barrier for an effective implementation of these types of programs. Variations in the design of the subsidy and on the regulators objective and constraints can have significant impact on the level and the cost of reduction of aggregate emissions achieved.

COSTOS DE CUMPLIMIENTO DE REGULACIÓN AMBIENTAL CON INFORMACIÓN INCOMPLETA: APLICACIÓN A FUENTES FIJAS DEL PCE DE SANTIAGO, CHILE

Estudiamos la propiedad de costo-efectividad de un sistema de permisos de emision transferibles (SPET) frente un sistema de estandares de emision. Nuestro analisis agrega a los costos de abatimiento, los costos de fiscalizacion para inducir cumplimiento. Consideramos, ademas, escenarios de informacion completa e incompleta. Las simulaciones numericas se basan en datos de las fuentes fijas que operan en el Programa de Compensacion de Emisiones (PCE) en Santiago de Chile. Los resultados muestran que un SPET no permite obtener mejoras en calidad del aire al minimo costo de fiscalizacion, pero mantiene su costo-efectividad en terminos de los costos totales de cumplimiento.

Costo-Efectividad de Instrumentos Económicos para el control de la contaminación: El Caso del Uso de Leña

We explore the cost-effectiveness of economic incentives to induce changes in wood consumption in urban areas. We consider the case of Temuco and Padre Las Casas in southern Chile. Three incentives schemes are considered: subsidy to the demand of dry wood

Sufficient optimality conditions hold for almost all nonlinear semidefinite programs

We derive a new genericity result for nonlinear semidefinite programming (NLSDP). Namely, almost all linear perturbations of a given NLSDP are shown to be nondegenerate. Here, nondegeneracy for NLSDP refers to the transversality constraint qualification, strict complementarity and second-order sufficient condition. Due to the presence of the second-order sufficient condition, our result is a nontrivial extension of the corresponding results for linear semidefinite programs (SDP) from Alizadeh et al. (Math Program 77(2, Ser. B):111–128, 1997). The proof of the genericity result makes use of Forsgren’s derivation of optimality conditions for NLSDP in Forsgren (Math Program 88(1, Ser. A):105–128, 2000). Due to the latter approach, the positive semidefiniteness of a symmetric matrix G(x), depending continuously on x, is locally equivalent to the fact that a certain Schur complement S(x) of G(x) is positive semidefinite. This yields a reduced NLSDP by considering the new semidefinite constraint

A self-concordance property for nonconvex semidefinite programming

S(x) \succeq 0

The spatial distribution of small- and large-scale fisheries in a marine protected area

S(x)⪰0, instead of