Search results for "Technical progress"
showing 10 items of 15 documents
Statistics-driven Development of OBD Systems: An Overview
2006
Automotive on-board diagnostic (OBD) systems are designed to keep critical components under control during vehicle functioning, and to alert the driver in case of severe malfunctions. OBD systems aimed at reducing polluting emissions are mandatory on new motor vehicles. Some research projects conducted in cooperation between universities and the automotive industry have been quite successful in terms of knowledge advancement and industrial gain. An updated overview of the adopted methodologies and results obtained are given in this article. Such results can be valuable for both theorists and practitioners, since they witness the use of statistics as a powerful catalyst of technical progress…
Optimal Sustainable Policies Under Pollution Ceiling: the Demographic Side
2014
AD; International audience; We study optimal sustainable policies in a benchmark logistic world (where both population and technological progress follow logistic laws of motion) subject to a pollution ceiling. The main policy in the hands of the benevolent planner is pollution abatement, ultimately leading to the control of a dirtiness index as in the early literature of the limits to growth literature. Besides inclusion of demographic dynamics, we also hypothesize that population size affects negatively the natural regeneration or assimilation rate, as a side product of human activities (like increasing pollution, deforestation, ...). We first characterize optimal sustainable policies. Und…
Performance assessment of water companies: A metafrontier approach accounting for quality of service and group heterogeneities
2021
Abstract The assessment of water companies’ efficiency, productivity and quality of service is part of the process to set water tariffs and therefore, is relevant for regulators and customers. However, the water industry involves several heterogeneous water companies. Following a pioneering approach, this study estimates productivity change and its drivers considering the non-homogeneous nature of the water companies and incorporating quality of service variables as undesirable outputs. In doing so, the metafrontier Malmquist Luenberger productivity index was estimated for a sample of English and Welsh water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) and water only companies (WoCs) over the years 2001–…
Convergence in OECD countries: technical change, efficiency and productivity
1998
The aim of this study is to analyze labor productivity convergence in the countries of the OECD over the period 1965-90. A non-parametric frontier approach is used to calculate the Malmquist productivity index. By breaking it down, the contribution to the growth of labor productivity of technical progress, of changes in efficiency, and of the accumulation of inputs per worker are quantified. Unlike other studies, the results obtained show that technical change has worked against labor productivity convergence, since it has always been greater in the countries with higher labor productivity. El trabajo tiene como objetivo básico analizar la contribución de las distintas fuentes del crecimien…
Assessing environmental performance trends in the transport industry: Eco-innovation or catching-up?
2015
Abstract This paper analyses the change in environmental performance that took place in the transport industry of 38 countries between the years 1995 and 2009. Data Envelopment Analysis techniques and directional distance functions are employed to compute Luenberger productivity indicators for the change in environmental performance and its determinants, namely, environmental technical change resulting from eco-innovation and catching-up with best available environmental technologies. Eight air pollutants account for the environmental contaminants from transport activities, and these are aggregated into three main categories of environmental pressures, namely, global warming, tropospheric o…
Does Obsolescence Matter? The Real Questions of Genetic Enhancement
2019
In his article, Robert Sparrow (2019) builds his arguments on a precondition of rapid technical progress in gene-editing technologies on one hand and on the implication that that gene-editing techn...
DEVELOPMENT OF LATVIAN AUTO ROADS AND ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT
2012
Auto road sector in national economy, is a sector development of which, with appropriate funding, creates basis for other sector development and facilitates competitiveness of country in international market. The goal of auto road sector is auto road network maintenance and development, in order to contribute to the development of the whole country, increase of standards of living of inhabitants, as well as facilitate compliance of Latvian auto roads with the European Union requirements for auto road network. Effective resource utilization and investment attraction to auto road sector is determinant for favorable conditions to overcome economic crisis, structural changes in national econom…
The History of European Infrastructure Finance: An Analytical Framework
2016
How can socio-economic resources be mobilized to pay for works that offer benefits only in the future, often in the distant future? We discuss what we understand by infrastructure, a term that can have different meanings/semantic contents, and whose definition issues reveal some recurrent conceptual problems. Finance is here understood in the very broad sense of a set of mechanisms bringing to investment, and future benefits, the resources needed in advance to pay for it. We offer a brief discussion of technological and organizational change, as several of our examples and other literature that we cite show that investment and finance decisions are deeply interwoven with knowledge, manageme…
Changes in the total costs of the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry: The decomposed effect of price and quantity inputs on efficiency
2020
Abstract Understanding what drives changes in regulated water companies' costs is of great relevance to water regulators. This study decomposes and estimates the change in total costs for a sample of ten water and sewerage companies in England and Wales from 1993 to 2016. The results demonstrate that companies' total costs increased over time due to increases in input prices and input quantity. Any gains obtained from the efficient allocation of resources and technical progress were lost due to mergers and technical inefficiency. Finally, we link our results with the regulatory cycle to evaluate the impact of the regulatory regime on companies' costs and discuss some policy implications.
Diagnosis in track and field performances past the 1988 Ben Johnson doping scandal
1999
Beginning with the early 1960s, a lot of performance supporting effects have been integrated in the structure of track and field training, such as technical progress, theoretical knowledge of the training process, development of societies and medical steps, which among others include the forbidden use of steroids or other doping ‘techniques’. Since the integration of those effects took place quite fast, a logistic growth of world class performances concerning the years 1960–1988 can be observed in many disciplines especially if they were not far developed at the beginning of this period. Eight years (1989–1996) later, doping tests of world class athletes have spread (or should have spread) …