Multiregional Perspective Research Articles

Exploring global embodied carbon emissions transfer network—An analysis based on national responsibility

This paper explores the global embodied carbon emissions transfer network. To clarify the carbon emissions reduction responsibilities of each country globally, a complex interdependent network structure based on the 2016 World Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) table and the transfer of production factors between industries is constructed. Using input-output and social network analyses, the structural features of the global carbon emissions flow network is uncovered, and then carbon inequality among countries from a multi-regional perspective is revealed. The research findings show that the scale of global embodied carbon transfer expands continuously. The direction of transfer exhibits asymmetry, regionalism, and complexity. Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Iran, Ethiopia, and Iran are the main carbon-exporting countries, while the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Spain are the main carbon-importing countries. Furthermore, the block model analysis reveals that the carbon transfer and transmission effects between global regions tend to be centralized clusters, from “demand-driven” to “internalized supply-demand coexistence”. There is significant uneven exchange between wealth benefits and environmental burdens among blocks.

Cost-optimal operation strategy for integrating large scale of renewable energy in China’s power system: From a multi-regional perspective

High renewable energy penetration is an effective way to decarbonize the power system. However, many studies focus on the economics of integrating renewables at the generation-side rather than system-wide. This paper aims to explore the cost-optimal operation strategies of a renewable-dominant power system. Considering both cost reduction potential of energy storage technology and regional investment cost variance of ultra-high voltage direct current grids, an hourly-resolution, multi-region model with total system costs minimized is proposed. Moreover, energy storage-based, ultra-high voltage direct current-based, and mixed scenarios are taken into consideration to investigate the economics of high renewables penetration. The results show that energy storage technology can achieve maximum penetration of renewable energy at 85.8% while the total system cost is 11.8% higher than that of ultra-high voltage direct current transmission technology. Although ultra-high voltage direct current grid is the most economical option to integrate renewables, the penetration is 13 percentage points lower than that of energy storage technology. The combination of energy storage technology and ultra-high voltage direct current grid can achieve 74.2% renewable energy penetration, saving 9.4% of total system costs compared to that of energy storage technology only. The cost-optimal option for East and South China is to promote both energy storage and ultra-high voltage direct current technologies. Energy storage technology is preferred among North, Northwest and Northeast China, while ultra-high voltage direct current grid is the optimal option for Center China.

Carbon inequality in global trade: Evidence from the mismatch between embodied carbon emissions and value added

Global trade not only brings about the exchange of goods and services, but also stimulates the transfer of carbon emissions. Given different economic development stages and industrial structures, global carbon inequality occurs due to the mismatch between trade-related carbon emissions and value added. Combining the multi-regional input-output model and regional environmental index (REI), this paper constructs an integrated research framework to trace the embodied carbon emissions and value-added among six regions from 2010 to 2015 to shed light on global carbon inequality from a multi-regional perspective. The results indicate that major carbon exporters are placed in inferior positions in global trade, rendering them victims of carbon inequality. The EU, Japan and the USA have been favored by global trade from both economic and environmental perspectives, and the advantaged position of the EU has improved whereas the positions of Japan and the USA have slightly decreased. For disadvantage regions, China and ASEAN10 has improved their situations, yet the inequality suffered by the RoW148 has deteriorated. Adjusting the export structure from primary to advanced products is an effective measure to mitigate global carbon inequality. Our major implications help strike thinking on the rationality of global trade and offer integral solutions towards sustainable development.

A systematic review of factors leading to occupational injuries and fatalities

PurposeThe burden of health and safety related issues emanating from the modern workplace is overwhelming. Although the prevailing statistics found in the literature show that victims of workplace fatalities and injuries are higher in developing countries and transition economies, there is a very limited understanding of the causal factors that may correspond to the continuous increase in the occupational exposure of employees to various fatalities and injuries. The purpose of this study was to review the literature on occupational safety of workers with the objective of highlighting the major causal factors of workplace injuries and fatalities from a multi-regional perspective, particularly on job-contexts with highest safety and health related hazards.MethodologyA systematic review of the literature was conducted on 73 empirical studies in the regions of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the Americas (the US & Canada).FindingsThe results showed that the highest number of injuries and fatalities were mostly found in the construction industry. It further emerged that most of the studies were centered in developing countries within Africa and Asia. Other results and recommendations were discussed for each region.ValueThe findings from this study have the potential to expose the regional dynamics in relation to safety in the workplace. This study also addresses the main areas of concern for stakeholders to promote organizational development and safety culture.

China’s intra- and inter-national carbon emission transfers by province: A nested network perspective

Since China carries an increasingly significant responsibility in carbon emission reduction, a systematic assessment from the multi-scale and multi-regional perspective is essential to examine the region-specific carbon emissions and different kinds of carbon transfer patterns. By identifying carbon emission flows among 31 domestic provincial administrative regions and 184 foreign countries/economies, this work examines the domestic and foreign carbon emission flows of Chinese provinces/municipalities based on the intra- and inter-national relations. Overall, the provinces and municipalities in China are divided into 4 patterns according to carbon emission flows, among which inland provinces mainly engage in domestic carbon emission transfers, western regions generally receive carbon emissions with main carbon outflows in northeastern and central provinces, and coastal regions play an essential role in balancing carbon emission surpluses and deficits between domestic and foreign regions. For different sub-regions in China, recognizing carbon emission transfer relations contributes to the synergetic and sustainable regional development from a tele-connected perspective. With the nested network analysis, the multi-scale and multi-regional assessments focusing upon China’s provinces and municipalities extend the existing research to both national and global scales, providing a solid foundation for sustainable regional development in China.

Exploring carbon emissions and international inequality in a globalized world: A multiregional-multisectoral perspective

The phenomenon of economic convergence has been investigated from different perspectives, aiming to analyze whether economies move towards a common growth path or tend to diverge over time, and the consequences of this for economic cohesion. However, these consequences for the evolution of CO2 emissions in the study of global convergence of CO2 emissions, and the implications in terms of pollution, inequality, and income-dependence have received less attention in the literature of convergence. The increasing globalization of economies and the rising fragmentation of supply chains imply many countries involved in the production chains and, in consequence, a vision is needed of worldwide emissions associated with these processes. In this paper, we use the multisectoral and multiregional perspective provided by a multiregional input-output model (MRIO), and the associated databases, to analyze the evolution of inequality in CO2 emissions, paying attention to the roles played by regional specificities and/or productive structures. MRIO models and indicators presented, provide the basis to assess to what extent countries and/or sectors are walking towards a common path or, on the contrary, tend to be more unequal over time. Given the role that structure, final demands and international trade play in these models, we can offer a novel structural view of the convergence issue. Moreover, MRIO models also allow analyzing this question combining the perspectives of production and consumption, and their relationship through international trade. Moreover, our paper attempts to shed light on the discussion about the global and regional process of generation of emissions, paying special attention to cluster analysis and to the existence of common trends by groups of countries. Empirically, the information provided by the most recent edition of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) and environmental accounts compatible with this database, is used. In our view, the results contribute new dimensions and insights to the issue of international inequality in terms of environmental pressures and opens new debates on the relocation of environmental damage, comparative advantage, and the environmental footprint.

Proteomic Atlas of the Human Brain in Alzheimer's Disease.

The brain represents one of the most divergent and critical organs in the human body. Yet, it can be afflicted by a variety of neurodegenerative diseases specifically linked to aging, about which we lack a full biomolecular understanding of onset and progression, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Here we provide a proteomic resource comprising nine anatomically distinct sections from three aged individuals, across a spectrum of disease progression, categorized by quantity of neurofibrillary tangles. Using state-of-the-art mass spectrometry, we identify a core brain proteome that exhibits only small variance in expression, accompanied by a group of proteins that are highly differentially expressed in individual sections and broader regions. AD affected tissue exhibited slightly elevated levels of tau protein with similar relative expression to factors associated with the AD pathology. Substantial differences were identified between previous proteomic studies of mature adult brains and our aged cohort. Our findings suggest considerable value in examining specifically the brain proteome of aged human populations from a multiregional perspective. This resource can serve as a guide, as well as a point of reference for how specific regions of the brain are affected by aging and neurodegeneration.

An integrated framework for embodied energy quantification of buildings in China: A multi-regional perspective

The construction industry has grown as the major energy consumer in China’s economy with the rapid development of urbanization, continually increasing the stress on the environment, healthcare, and economy. Therefore, this study developed an integrated framework for embodied energy quantification of China’s buildings from a multi-regional perspective. This article builds on previous work on embodied energy quantification and develops an optimized algorithm that illustrated how the technological difference and the regional features are calculated as indices of embodied energy quantification at the project level, using multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis, structural path analysis (SPA), and process-based LCA model as the underlying methods. The structure of the proposed framework using calculative modules as well as the data sources are specified. The application of the analytical framework in real building cases demonstrates that it can provide valuable information of detailed embodied energy distribution through the whole supply chain. The implementation of the proposed framework can facilitate decision-makers to examine the effects of changes in geographical location, building type, and building structure on the total embodied energy consumption.

Households’ Energy Consumption Change in China: A Multi-Regional Perspective

As China’s economy enters the “new normal” phase, its growth model has gradually changed to focus more on domestic consumption. In this paper, we examine regional disparities in households’ total (direct and indirect) energy use in China from 2002 to 2012. Using a structural decomposition approach, we examine how changes in China’s technology, economic structure, urbanization, lifestyle, and interregional trade affect household energy use across different regions. We find that rising income levels contributed most to energy usage. Improved energy efficiency offset the rising effects of heightened household consumption in most regions. Rural-to-urban migration played an important role in enhancing energy use in all regions from 2002 to 2012. Moreover, households started to rely more heavily on interregional trade of final goods and services to meet their consumption demands. Based on this multi-regional and multi-angle study, we provide some regional-specific policies that would help curb household energy demand and promote sustainable consumption in China.

Aligning domestic policies with international coordination in a post-Paris global climate regime: A case for China

The Paris COP-21 reached a climate agreement on 2-degree global emissions stabilisation target. However, the likelihood of successfully implementing a legally binding global climate treaty will depend to a large degree on the macroeconomic impacts of different policy options on developing and emerging economies. It is thus crucial to evaluate the transition costs of implementing different climate policy architectures under socioeconomic and technological uncertainties from a multiregional perspective. Here we use a hybrid computable general equilibrium model, in which sub-optimalities, infrastructural inertia and technological uncertainties are explicitly introduced, to quantify the trajectories of variation in transitions costs under a range of climate policy scenarios in both Annex I and developing nations. The policy architectures are based around the implementation of the ‘streamlined Paris Pledges’ (SPP) in developing countries with a particular focus on China and India. Our results indicate that the distributional effects should be taken into account by policymakers through extension of SPP to 2050 as global climate policies may have asymmetrical economic impacts between Annex I and developing countries. A first-best policy of global cap-and-trade scheme alone could be welfare-deteriorating for some parties, reflected by a significant reduction in macroeconomic growth rate over the course of the next decades. Modelling results also suggest that articulating both global and national policies in a multiregional climate deal can provide a palatable solution for countries like China as this would allow for significant reduction in the economic losses associated with a unique-carbon-price global climate policy. This hybrid approach is also aligned with specific development priorities in developing and emerging countries by providing flexibility to their domestic policy framework, which expects to facilitate the transition to low carbon growth trajectory by encouraging intersectoral coordination. Last, procrastination of technical change and delayed structural reform for decarbonising economy would entail significantly higher transition costs for developing countries in case of stringent climate policy due to the economic competitiveness forgone as a result of exorbitant carbon prices in the longer term. Relevant policy options and research perspectives are discussed accordingly.

A note on distortions from estimating the regional impacts of exogenous changes in output

ABSTRACTThis paper demonstrates both theoretically and empirically that when outputs instead of final demands are exogenously predetermined, the traditional Leontief final demand model overestimates economic impact, and even more so in a multiregional context. We assess this premise vis-à-vis the Leontief output model using the 2013 interregional input–output table of the Republic of Korea. We find that from a multiregional perspective the standard Leontief final demand model yields substantially biased output multipliers for Chungbuk Province.

Applied Multiregional Demography: Migration and Population Redistribution

Book reviews Applied Multiregional Demography: Migration and Population Redistribution by Andrei Rogers Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer 2016 ISBN 978-3-319-22317-9 Softcover $54.99, 114 pp. Reviewed by David A. Swanson Department of Sociology, University of California Riverside As I read through Applied Multiregional Demography: Migration and Population Redistribution, I repeatedly stopped to compare it to a book I read last by Frans Willekens: Multistate Analysis of Life Histories with R (for a review, see Swanson 2015). I find Willekens’ book much more innovative and useful than this book by Rogers. Willekens’ book is much more innovative because he discusses the data problems faced when considering multi-state demography, and he offers ways to overcome them (e.g., with micro-level data). Rogers however, focuses on the use of aggregated data and gives the problems associated with aggregated data very short shrift. Instead, he spends too much of the book complaining about the shortcomings of other approaches. Rogers also spends too much of the book on another complaint—the use of “net migration” as a concept in demo- graphic analysis. I find his complaint ironic given that in this book, there are 26 instances of the use of “natural increase,” which is itself a net measure, conceptually the same as net migration. Unlike “Requiem for the net migrant” (Rogers 1990), I have never run across a work by Rogers titled “Requiem for the natural increment.” I find the discussion of another construct also to be ironic. Toward the end of the book, Rogers notes that “double-entry bookkeeping” is conceptually similar to “multi-regional migration.” Of course it is! But what Rogers fails to bring into this discussion is the fact that for all businesses, including those who use double-entry bookkeeping and those that do not, the bottom line is “profit,” a measure that is conceptually the same as net migration. As is the case with the “natural increment,” I have never read something by Rogers entitled “Requiem for profit.” The actual examples of applications provided by Rogers in terms of multi-regional demography all involve large pieces of geography. There is nothing on small pieces of geography, such as counties, much less census tracts. Is this because of the difficulty encountered in getting the data needed to implement the multi-regional approach for small areas such as counties, census tracts, and the like? Even for the examples he provides, there is absolutely no mention of the issues affecting the validity and reliability of the data required. This is especially important in the US, where the problematic “long form” data needed to use a multi-regional perspective in the past have been replaced by the far more problematic “American Community Survey” data. As such, I find the examples to be not very useful. For what it does cover—large geographic areas, aggregate data, and a list of the problematic issues asso- ciated with net migration—the book is fine. However, if you are not interested in polemics on net migration, but are interested in actually implementing the multi-regional approach, especially for small geographic levels using micro-level data, I recommend instead the book by Willekens, who provides a much more innovative perspective, along with useful examples. In a similar vein, another useful example is found in the work of Wil- son (forthcoming), who uses the “multi-regional” perspective to effect dynamic changes in ethnic identity in a micro-simulation projection.

Community perceptions of carbon capture and sequestration in the US: A multiregional perspective

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

Community perceptions of carbon capture and sequestration in the US: A multiregional perspective

Community perceptions of carbon capture and sequestration in the US: A multiregional perspective

Demographic Modeling of the Geography of Migration and Population: A Multiregional Perspective

This article focuses on the development and evolution of migration and population redistribution modeling within the spatial context of multiregional demography. It begins in 1965, when the state‐of‐the‐art consisted largely of ideas and techniques imported from other disciplines (regression analysis, gravity models, Markov chains, and matrix cohort‐survival population projection models) and then continues on to tell the story of multiregional demography, its evolution and emergence as a fully developed paradigm for studying the spatial dynamics of migration and population redistribution and, more recently, its approach for estimating the necessary migration input measures from inadequate data.

East, West, and World Theatre

The study of world theatre was greatly advanced by the publication in 1967 of Leonard C. Pronko's Theater East and West (rev. ed. 1974). In this article, Steve Tillis notes Pronko's seminal contribution but contends that the East-West Approach has outlived its usefulness. He argues that the East/West dichotomy is based on three assumptions that are at once factually untrue and profoundly Eurocentric: first, that East and West are coherent cultural entities; second, that East and West are roughly of the same magnitude and, between them, comprehend the world; and third, that Eastern and Western theatre forms make up two fundamentally distinct kinds of theatre. Tillis suggests that world theatre studies would best be served if the East-West Approach were replaced by a multiregional perspective offering a sound framework for scholarship.

A multiregional perspective on growth and environment: The role of endogenous technology and trade

Until recently, the interaction between environmental quality, economic activity and growth is predominantly considered in an a-spatial context. Traditional neoclassical growth theory following Solow/Swan has mainly addressed questions about environmental and resource limits to growth. Recently, much attention is also devoted to the environment-growth interface from an endogenous growth perspective. However, an important element that is missing in both the neoclassical and endogenous growth approaches is a multiregional perspective. The present theoretical study tries to present one of the first attempts to fill this gap. The analysis is based on a model of two interactive regions, with possible interaction between the regional environments via the global environment. The implications of this type of analysis are manifold. One is that endogeneity of growth is not only due to technology and knowledge formation but also to the effects of trade, resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Another implication is that a coordinated environmental policy of regions should address long-term sustainability, and take account of the positive technological and negative environmental dynamic externalities.

Requiem for the Fixed‐Transition‐Probability Migrant

In a recent paper titled “Requiem for the Net Migrant” Andrei Rogers persuasively argues for the use of a multiregional perspective rather than a uniregional one in measuring and projecting the dynamics of internal migration. In particular, he highlights the deficiencies of using net migration rates in population projections, giving illustrations of the very large differences that can occur if constant net migration rates are assumed versus fixed interregional transition probabilities. Net migration rates are conceptually unsound because their denominators are not true “at‐risk” populations. Fixed interregional transition probabilities, however, are inconsistent with a sound behavioral representation of migration system dynamics. Whereas such stationary Markov models posit a role for shifting origin region populations, they do not embed the assumptions intrinsic to gravity or opportunity model concepts about the role of changing destination region populations. This paper explores alternative, more behaviorally pleasing interregional models that posit a role for shifting destination populations in altering the attractiveness of migration alternatives. Density‐dampened, destination‐population‐weighted transition probability structures are explored. The importance of modeling intraregional migration separately from nonmovement is stressed.

Requiem for the Net Migrant

Despite recent research that has demonstrated the clear superiority of a multiregional perspective in measuring and projecting the dynamics of internal migration flows, many scholars continue to adopt the uniregional perspective that is forced to focus on net migrants, a nonexistent category of individuals. Net migration models are misspecified because the rates that they use confound changing migration propensities with changing population stocks. Moreover, they obscure regularities in age profiles of migration and thereby further misspecify the spatial dynamics generating observed settlement patterns. Thus, the use of the net migration rate as the dependent variable in explanatory models of migration can produce a misspecification of the fundamental relationships that are the subject of inquiry. This paper considers deficiencies of the net migration concept and illustrates them with numerical examples.

Optimal intertemporal supplies of crude oil and natural gas for Canada

Several circumstances complicate determination of an optimal depletion path for an exhaustible resource. For Canadian crude oil and natural gas, these include the importance of a multiregional perspective, the presence of import or export options, supply options with particular recovery profiles, and the differing demand-supply circumstances of light/medium crude and heavy crude. In this paper twelve conclusions are drawn regarding optimal, supplies of oil and gas for Canada using an intertemporal optimization model allowing for these and other considerations. Canadian prices and demands are based on world oil prices, which surge toward the end of the 1980s, fall subsequently, then rise later. The most important finding is that crude oil supplies are sensitive to supply costs and the discount rate, and there are many near-optimal depletion patterns. Non-efficiency performance criteria therefore acquire greater importance for selecting a socially optimal depletion path. These conclusions appear applicable to other countries with indigenous oil and gas supply prospects.