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On croyait les démons assagis : à la faveur de la crise financière de 2008, les Etats avaient repris le dessus sur les marchés financiers et les politiques économiques savaient répondre et conjurer la dépression. Mais la tempête qui a ébranlé la zone euro entre 2009 et 2012, au départ crise banale dans une petite économie périphérique, la Grèce, a gagné un pays après l’autre et a menacé d’emporter tout l’édifice monétaire européen. Dans ce brillant essai, Jean Pisani-Ferry retrace les étapes de la crise et analyse les solutions adoptées. Si l’Europe a fait preuve d’un remarquable sens de la survie, elle souffre aujourd’hui d’une dangereuse absence de communauté de projets.
This article offers an empirically grounded interpretivist theory of the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights based on domestic judicial and political elite accounts of the legitimacy of the Court in Turkey, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The central argument of the article is that the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is based on a constant comparison between the values and goals of domestic institutions and the values and goals of the European Court of Human Rights. More specifically, the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is grounded in the logic of a fair compromise: What actors think they lose by according legitimacy to the European Court of Human Rights must be balanced by what they perceive to gain in return. Three factors organise how actors in different domestic settings struck a fair compromise in their domestic contexts: a) perception of domestic human rights conditions, b) commitment to cosmopolitan ideals of human rights and international law and c) commitment to domestic institutions.
This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the market value of variable renewable energy (VRE). The inherent variability of wind speeds and solar radiation affects the price that VRE generators receive on the market (market value). During windy and sunny times the additional electricity supply reduces the prices. Because the drop is larger with more installed capacity, the market value of VRE falls with higher penetration rate. This study aims to develop a better understanding on how the market value with penetration, and how policies and prices affect the market value. Quantitative evidence is derived from a review of published studies, regression analysis of market data, and the calibrated model of the European electricity market EMMA. We find the value of wind power to fall from 110% of the average power price to 50–80% as wind penetration increases from zero to 30% of total electricity consumption. For solar power, similarly low value levels are reached already at 15% penetration. Hence, competitive large-scale renewable deployment will be more difficult to accomplish than as many anticipate.
Energy and climate policies are usually seen as measures to internalize externalities. However, as a side effect, the introduction of these policies redistributes wealth between consumers and producers, and within these groups. While redistribution is seldom the focus of the academic literature in energy economics, it plays a central role in public debates and policy decisions. This paper compares the distributional effects of two major electricity policies: support schemes for renewable energy sources, and CO2 pricing. We find that the redistribution effects of both policies are large, and they work in opposed directions. While renewables support transfers wealth from producers to consumers, carbon pricing does the opposite. More specifically, we show that moderate amounts of wind subsidies can increase consumer surplus, even if consumers bear the subsidy costs. CO2 pricing, in contrast, increases aggregated producer surplus, even without free allocation of emission allowances; however, not all types of producers benefit. These findings are derived from an analytical model of electricity markets, and a calibrated numerical model of Northwestern Europe. Our findings imply that if policy makers want to avoid large redistribution they might prefer a mix of policies, even if CO2 pricing alone is the first-best climate policy in terms of allocative efficiency.
Levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) are a common metric for comparing power generating technologies. However, there is criticism particularly towards evaluating variable renewables like wind and solar PV power based on LCOE because it ignores variability and integration costs. We propose a new metric System LCOE that accounts for integration and generation costs. For this purpose we develop a new mathematical definition of integration costs that directly relates to economic theory. As a result System LCOE allow the economic comparison of generating technologies and deriving optimal quantities in particular for VRE. To demonstrate the new concept we quantify System LCOE from a simple power system model and literature values. We find that at high wind shares integration costs can be in the same range as generation costs of wind power and conventional plants in particular due to a cost component “profile costs” captured by the new definition. Integration costs increase with growing wind shares and might become an economic barrier to deploying VRE at high shares. System LCOE help understanding and resolving the challenge of integrating VRE and can guide research and policy makers in realizing a cost-efficient transformation towards an energy system with potentially high shares of variable renewables.
With the global expansion of renewable energy (RE) technologies, the provision of optimal RE policy packages becomes an important task. We review pivotal aspects regarding the economics of renewables that are relevant to the design of an optimal RE policy, many of which are to date unresolved. We do so from three interrelated perspectives that a meaningful public policy framework for inquiry must take into account. First, we explore different social objectives justifying the deployment of RE technologies, including potential co-benefits of RE deployment, and review modelbased estimates of the economic potential of RE technologies, i.e. their socially optimal deployment level. Second, we address pivotal market failures that arise in the course of implementing the economic potential of RE sources in decentralized markets. Third, we discuss multiple policy instruments curing these market failures. Our framework reveals the requirements for an assessment of the relevant options for real-world decision makers in the field of RE policies. This review makes it clear that there are remaining white areas on the knowledge map concerning consistent and socially optimal RE policies.
Should there be free trade? This question finds different, and often contradicting answers in philosophy and economics. Among economists, there is a remarkable consensus that free markets are desirable. It is this curious consensus that motivates this study.
This dissertations aims to explain, reconstruct and contest the neoclassical vision in mainstream trade theory. It is argued that economic justifications for free trade policies rely on an array of implicit and explicit normative premises,and that economists take positions on topics that are usually dealt with by political philosophers. Taken together, these premises and positions amount to what will be called the neoclassical vision. It is argued that throughout the history of economics, economic doctrines were inescapably normative. Tracing the intellectual and historical origins of this neoclassical vision, it is shown how a specific view of what justice demands in the economy came to be constitutive of today’s economic arguments. I hence attempt to treat economics today as it has historically been: as a branch of political philosophy, and as inextricably normative.
Normative trade theory and the theoretical arguments put forward by international economists will serve as the case study on which basis the neoclassical vision is reconstructed. In turn, the vision will be critically assessed from a liberal egalitarian perspective. Particular attention will be paid to the question of the role of politics in how losers from economic activity are treated.
Following this critical analysis, I argue for the need of a normative ‘countervision’that is most convincingly provided by John Rawls’s early work. It will then be outlined how Rawls could respond and overcome the pitfalls of the neoclassical vision – even though Rawls is deeply influenced by conventional economic thought himself. (...)