اهمیت ابعاد محلی/ منطقه ای از توسعه پایدار: تجزیه و تحلیل تعادل عمومی قابل محاسبه گویا از اقتصاد نیوجرسی

This paper uses a multi-period economic-environmental Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling framework to analyse local sustainability policy issues. Our focus is the small, open, labour-constrained regional economy of Jersey. The case of Jersey is of particular interest for two main reasons. The first is the unusually low degree of geographical labour market integration for such a small regional economy. This motivates our treatment of labour as a region-specific factor of production. The second is the availability of high quality, Jersey-specific economic-enviromental data. We employ CGE model simulations to track the impact of changes in population on a number of energy-consumption and pollution indicators in a recursive dynamic framework under alternative hypotheses regarding economic conditions over the time period under consideration. In the case of Jersey, we find that household consumption is the key factor governing the environmental impact of economic disturbances. Therefore the analysis includes an examination of the sensitivity of the simulation results to different assumptions affecting the wage elasticities of labour demand and supply, and the speed of adjustment to equilibrium on the responsiveness of household income to shifts in labour supply.

The ‘Rio Declaration’ and Agenda 21 agreements of the 1992 Earth Summit (United Nations, 1992) stimulated considerable interest in modelling the impact of economic activity on indicators of sustainability and assessing the economic costs of reducing that impact.1 While the problems of sustainability in general, and climate change in particular, are inherently global, a number of sub-global models have been developed to examine these issues. Many of these models have been constructed for national or regional economies that are small relative to the rest of the world, even though the impact on global sustainability of any change in activity in such target economies is likely to be trivial. One of the reasons for modelling sustainability issues in a small economy context arises from commitments to international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol on reducing CO2 emissions. These commitments place constraints on economic activity at the national or regional level. Modelling the impacts of national policies to reduce CO2 emissions has been tackled at the national level by Bergman, 1990 and Bergman, 1991, Stephan et al. (1992) and Böhringer and Rutherford (1997) and at the sub-national level by Conrad and Schroder, 1991 and Conrad and Schroder, 1993, Li and Rose (1995), and Kamat et al. (1999). A second reason is that, even if the concern is solely with global sustainability, in many countries, regional authorities have sufficient discretion over aspects of economic and environmental policy to ensure that national policies can only be delivered with their co-operation. In fact, one of the key elements of the Agenda 21 framework is the understanding that because many sustainability problems and solutions “have their roots in local activities, the participation and co-operation of local authorities will be a determining factor in fulfilling its [Agenda 21] objectives” (United Nations, 1992, p.233). In the case of the UK, a significant degree of responsibility for setting and achieving sustainability objectives has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the English Regional Development Agencies. Finally, for sub-national levels of government, sustainability objectives are likely also to reflect a wider concern for quality of life values that apply to the local economy, rather than indicators that feature in global sustainability debates. For example, there may be fears for the impact on local public health from pollution generation, even if the type or level of emissions does not conflict with any international agreements to which the nation or region is a party. We use the Jersey economy to illustrate the importance of the local/regional dimension of sustainability. Jersey is the largest of the Channel Islands, situated about 100 km south of the British mainland. It is a crown dependency of the United Kingdom and its economy is very closely integrated with that of the UK, sharing its language, currency and interest rates. The choice of Jersey is partly motivated by the availability of a comprehensive region-specific, economic-environmental database that is at present unique within the UK (Coley, 1994). However, there are also specific characteristics of the Jersey economy which make it of particular interest. Jersey is an independent self-governing state. It therefore represents the limiting case of what is effectively a regional economy with full fiscal autonomy and considerable latitude to pursue its own local sustainability policies. Moreover, the current policy climate in Jersey exhibits the wider emphasis on the local, as opposed to global, perspective to sustainability that characterises most small economies. The Jersey economy is distinctive in that it has a labour market that is both very tight – with an unemployment rate of less than 1% – and also unusually weakly integrated with other regional labour markets. This, taken with a lack of diversity in the structure of the economy, means that the policy response to the issue of ‘sustainability’ is of particular interest.

In this paper we explore the local/regional dimensions of sustainability in the Jersey economy. We illustrate these local/regional issues by focussing on the impact of relaxing the labour force constraint through increased in-migration. The main findings are that whilst this generates a positive stimulus to activity in the economy, this stimulus is relatively small and is accompanied by falling real wages and productivity, and rising congestion and pollution. However, the in-migration modelled here might have one important positive characteristic from a policy perspective. An expansion in export demand in the Finance sectors leads to sectoral disruption as employment is pulled into the expanding sectors. In-migration, which eases the labour shortage over all sectors, could play a key role in easing these sectoral tensions. Overall, we believe that our analysis demonstrates the potential value from using local/regional economic-environmental CGEs. When calibrated to capture the key characteristics of the local economy (in terms of both model data and specification), these models can explore the local/regional contributions to local, national and global sustainability objectives. This approach is likely to find fruitful application elsewhere. In the UK the local/regional dimension of sustainability per se is becoming increasingly important, as is the role of sub-national governments in delivering national commitments to international sustainability agreements.