Faye Duchin

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Economics, Faculty Member

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Strategies for environmentally sound economic development; An input-output analysis

IEEE Power Engineering Review, 1991

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International Society for Ecological Economics Online Encyclopaedia of Ecological Economics Industrial Ecology

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The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Michael Brower and Warren Leon, Three Rivers Press, 1999, ISBN: 0-609-80281-X, 304 pp

... goal. Read it and weed out your most damaging practices while keeping much of what makes life... more

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA: INTERREGIONAL TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE AND REGIONAL COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE

Economic Systems Research, 2009

Significant economic disparities among China's Eastern, Central, and Western regions pose unequiv... more Significant economic disparities among China's Eastern, Central, and Western regions pose unequivocal challenges to social equality and political stability in the country. A major impediment to economic development, especially in the poor, remote Western region, is the shortage of a transportation infrastructure. The Chinese government has committed to substantial investment for improving the accessibility of this vast, land-locked region as a mechanism for promoting its development. The paper examines the impacts of the intended transportation infrastructure build-up on the Western region's comparative advantage and its interregional trade. The World Trade Model is extended to represent this investment and applied to determine interregional trade in China based on region-specific technologies, factor endowments and prices, and consumption patterns as well as the capacities and costs of carrying goods among regions using the interregional transportation infrastructure in place in the base year of 1997 and that planned for 2010 and 2020. The model is implemented for three regions, 27 sectors, and seven factors. The results indicate that the planned infrastructure build-up will be cost-effective, will increase benefits especially for the Western region, and that it can conserve energy overall at given levels of demand but substitute oil for coal. Based on these and other model results, some recommendations are offered about strategies for regional development in China.

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Input-Output Economics and Material Flows

Two fields of scientific inquiry can be interconnected effectively only through a clear conceptua... more

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Artificial Intelligence: Its Impact on Human Occupations and Distribution of Income

Sustainable Consumption of Food

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A world trade model with bilateral trade based on comparative advantage

Economic Systems Research, 2006

This paper describes an extension of Duchin's world trade model to include the explicit represent... more This paper describes an extension of Duchin's world trade model to include the explicit representation of transportation costs, permitting the endogenous determination of bilateral trade flows and region-specific prices. The original model is a linear program that, based on comparative advantage and the minimization of factor use, determines regional production and trade flows as well as world prices and scarcity rents for m regions, n good, and k factors. The new world trade model with bilateral trade achieves its objectives by introducing transportation services and geographically dependent transportation requirements for each traded good and each pair of potential trade partners. The formulation of this model and its major properties are presented, and results from a preliminary analysis with 11 regions, eight goods, four transportation sectors, and six factors of production are reported and compared with corresponding results from the world trade model. On the basis of this comparison, we conclude that transportation costs have little impact on a region's total imports or exports of a given commodity.

A world trade model based on comparative advantage with m regions, n goods, and k factors

Economic Systems Research, 2005

This paper describes the World Trade Model, a linear program that determines world prices, scarci... more This paper describes the World Trade Model, a linear program that determines world prices, scarcity rents, and international trade flows based on comparative advantage in a world economy with m regions, n goods, and k factors. Major properties of the model are demonstrated, including the sources of the gains from trade for the world as a whole and for individual regions. Preliminary empirical results are reported for a 10-region, 8-good, 3-factor model of the world economy. The new model generalizes the World Model of Leontief, Carter, and Petri in ways which make it particularly useful for analyzing scenarios about sustainable development. . I am grateful for research assistance provided by Roxana Julia and, at earlier stages, by Jennifer Blue, Jose Vazquez and Ada Ferrer-Carbonell. I thank Moon Duchin for her extensive comments.

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Industrial Input-Output Analysis: Implications for Industrial Ecology

Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, 1992

Industrial ecology will need to develop fundamentally new approaches to reducing, reusing, and re... more Industrial ecology will need to develop fundamentally new approaches to reducing, reusing, and recycling wastes. Industrial ecology will also require an analytic framework for examining the implications for the economic system as a whole of each potential web of industrial changes. A suitable framework is furnished by structural economics, which situates the economy within the physical world. This approach is based on dynamic analysis rather than static concepts of equilibrium, and optimization assumptions are used selectively rather than as the general solution mechanism. Input-output economics, an important formal model within structural economics, can trace the stocks and flows of energy and other materials from extraction through production and consumption to recycling or disposal. An input-output computation, including wastes, is presented; it illustrates the separate but integrated analysis of physical stocks and flows and of prices and costs. This paper also describes the major advances that have been made in the last decade in the extension of input-output economics to address increasingly complex questions, notably the fully dynamic physical/price/income model and the engineering/input-output data base. Economists need to be able to assess the costs of cleaning up and to develop incentive schemes to increase the likelihood this will happen. To do this, economists need to take on the difficult "how" questions that concern industrial ecologists since the cost, and indeed the wider implications, of cleaning up depends upon how it is done. Structural economics, and modern input-output models and data bases, in particular, can help meet this challenge.

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Technological change, trade and the environment

Ecological Economics, 1995

Trade policies and environmental policies have evolved largely independently, and until recently ... more Trade policies and environmental policies have evolved largely independently, and until recently their interactions attracted little attention. There is much discussion of the institutional arrangements and economic instruments needed to embody environmental concerns in trade policy, but relatively little discussion of the role of technology. This paper describes the long-term, environmentally-motivated technological change involved in shifting from an "end-of-pipe" approach for capturing pollutants after they are generated to a focus on the prevention of environmental degradation. The new engineering field of Industrial Ecology promotes design and manufacturing practices that are based on an examination of the full life-cycle of a product in order to improve environmental performance. Industrial Ecology is spreading quickly in the industrialized countries, but its repercussions are transmitted widely through international trade. Plastics provide a good example of both the opportunities and the difficulties surrounding environmental protection, technological change, and trade. Concerns over solid waste in the rich countries may result in new market opportunities for biomass-based polymers, but the success of these products depends upon a complex set of factors, including very different alternative ways individual countries may choose to deal with solid waste. The implications for the developing countries are examined for the case of plastics, and more generally.

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The Future of the Environment: Ecological Economics and Technological Change

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Sustainable Consumption of Food: A Framework for Analyzing Scenarios about Changes in Diets

Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2005

This article describes the integration of life-cycle assessment methods with a new input-output m... more This article describes the integration of life-cycle assessment methods with a new input-output model of the world economy to analyze the environmental and economic implications of alternative future diets. The article reviews findings by industrial ecologists about the energy and land required for the production and consumption of alternative foods and diets in several European countries. It also reviews attributes of foods and diets identified by nutritionists as reducing the risks of obesity and major chronic diseases related to the diets of the affluent. The predominantly plant-based Mediterranean-type diet emerges as a dietary scenario that could satisfy both sets of concerns. The likely implications for agriculture and for farm policies of a shift toward this diet from the current average diet in the United States are discussed and shown to be substantial. The one-country studies reviewed in the article provide substantial insights into the potential ramifications of dietary change. Many of the limitations of these studies could be overcome by conducting the analysis in a global framework that represented the relationships among consumption, production, and trade and the physical constraints within which they operate. Analysis of the environmental and economic implications of alternative scenarios describing healthy diets can help stimulate more intensive dialogue, debate, and action among the interested parties; such analysis can both benefit from and contribute to initiatives such as the World Health Organization's global strategy on diet and health, which intends to enlist the support of governments, corporations, and civil society. Keywords diet and environment diet and health life-cycle assessment (LCA) input-output analysis (IOA) scenario analysis world trade model

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Regional Development in China: Interregional Transportation Infrastructure and Regional Comparative Advantage

Significant economic disparities among China's Eastern, Central, and Western regions pose unequiv... more Significant economic disparities among China's Eastern, Central, and Western regions pose unequivocal challenges to social equality and political stability in the country. A major impediment to economic development, especially in the poor, remote Western region, is the shortage of transportation infrastructure. The Chinese government has committed to substantial investment for improving the accessibility of this vast, landlocked region as a mechanism for promoting its development. The paper examines the impacts of the intended transportation infrastructure buildup on the Western region's comparative advantage and its interregional trade. The World Trade Model is extended to represent this investment and applied to determine interregional trade in China based on region-specific technologies, factor endowments and prices, and consumption patterns as well as the capacities and costs of carrying goods among regions using the interregional transportation infrastructure in place in the base year of 1997 and that planned for 2010 and 2020. The model is implemented for 3 regions, 27 sectors, and 7 factors. The results indicate that the planned infrastructure buildup will be cost-effective, will increase benefits especially for the Western region, and that it can conserve energy overall at given levels of demand but substitute oil for coal. Based on these and other model results, some recommendations are offered about strategies for regional development in China.

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Faye Duchin

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