No Arabic abstract
The Asian-pacific region is the major international tourism demand market in the world, and its tourism demand is deeply affected by various factors. Previous studies have shown that different market factors influence the tourism market demand at different timescales. Accordingly, the decomposition ensemble learning approach is proposed to analyze the impact of different market factors on market demand, and the potential advantages of the proposed method on forecasting tourism demand in the Asia-pacific region are further explored. This study carefully explores the multi-scale relationship between tourist destinations and the major source countries, by decomposing the corresponding monthly tourist arrivals with noise-assisted multivariate empirical mode decomposition. With the China and Malaysia as case studies, their respective empirical results show that decomposition ensemble approach significantly better than the benchmarks which include statistical model, machine learning and deep learning model, in terms of the level forecasting accuracy and directional forecasting accuracy.
Vaccination has been perceived as a key to reaching herd immunity in the current COVID-19 pandemic. This paper examines effectiveness of different vaccination strategies. We investigate the effects of two key elements in mass vaccination, which are allocations and timing of first and second doses and types of vaccines, on the spread of COVID-19. Amid limited supply of approved vaccines and constrained medical resources, the choice of a vaccination strategy is fundamentally an economic problem. We employ standard time-series and panel data models commonly used in economic research with real world data to estimate the effects of progress in vaccination and types of vaccines on health outcomes. Potential confounders such as government responses and peoples behavioral changes are also taken into account. Our findings suggest that the share of people vaccinated with at least one dose is significantly negatively associated with new infections and deaths. Conditioning on first dose progress, full vaccination offers no further reductions in new cases and deaths. For vaccines from China, however, we find weaker effects of vaccination progress on health outcomes. Our results support the extending interval between first and second dose policy adopted by Canada and the UK among others for mRNA-based vaccines. As vaccination progressed, peoples mobility increased and it offset the direct effects of vaccination. Therefore, public health measures are still important to contain the transmission by refraining people from being more mobile after vaccinated.
In this paper we develop a novel method of wholesale electricity market modeling. Our optimization-based model decomposes wholesale supply and demand curves into buy and sell orders of individual market participants. In doing so, the model detects and removes arbitrage orders. As a result, we construct an innovative fundamental model of a wholesale electricity market. First, our fundamental demand curve has a unique composition. The demand curve lies in between the wholesale demand curve and a perfectly inelastic demand curve. Second, our fundamental supply and demand curves contain only actual (i.e. non-arbitrage) transactions with physical assets on buy and sell sides. Third, these transactions are designated to one of the three groups of wholesale electricity market participants: retailers, suppliers, or utility companies. To evaluate the performance of our model, we use the German wholesale market data. Our fundamental model yields a more precise approximation of the actual load values than a model with perfectly inelastic demand. Moreover, we conduct a study of wholesale demand elasticities. The obtained conclusions regarding wholesale demand elasticity are consistent with the existing academic literature.
How does food consumption improve educational outcomes is an important policy issue for developing countries. Applying the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) 2014, we estimate the returns of food consumption to education and investigate if more educated individuals tend to consume healthier bundles than less-educated individuals do. We implement the Expected Outcome Methodology, which is similar to Average Treatment on The Treated (ATT) conceptualized by Angrist and Pischke (2009). We find that education tends to tilt consumption towards healthier foods. Specifically, individuals with upper secondary or higher levels of education, on average, consume 31.5% more healthy foods than those with lower secondary education or lower levels of education. With respect to unhealthy food consumption, more highly-educated individuals, on average, consume 22.8% less unhealthy food than less-educated individuals. This suggests that education can increase the inequality in the consumption of healthy food bundles. Our study suggests that it is important to design policies to expand education for all for at least up to higher secondary level in the context of Indonesia. Our finding also speaks to the link between food-health gradient and human capital formation for a developing country such as Indonesia.
The Ballast Water Management Convention can decrease the introduction risk of harmful aquatic organisms and pathogens, yet the Convention increases shipping costs and causes subsequent economic impacts. This paper examines whether the Convention generates disproportionate invasion risk reduction results and economic impacts on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Risk reduction is estimated with an invasion risk assessment model based on a higher-order network, and the effects of the regulation on national economies and trade are estimated with an integrated shipping cost and computable general equilibrium modeling framework. Then we use the Lorenz curve to examine if the regulation generates risk or economic inequality among regions. Risk reduction ratios of all regions (except Singapore) are above 99%, which proves the effectiveness of the Convention. The Gini coefficient of 0.66 shows the inequality in risk changes relative to income levels among regions, but risk reductions across all nations vary without particularly high risks for SIDS and LDCs than for large economies. Similarly, we reveal inequality in economic impacts relative to income levels (the Gini coefficient is 0.58), but there is no evidence that SIDS and LDCs are disproportionately impacted compared to more developed regions. Most changes in GDP, real exports, and real imports of studied regions are minor (smaller than 0.1%). However, there are more noteworthy changes for select sectors and trade partners including Togo, Bangladesh, and Dominican Republic, whose exports may decrease for textiles and metal and chemicals. We conclude the Convention decreases biological invasion risk and does not generate disproportionate negative impacts on SIDS and LDCs.
Economic shocks due to Covid-19 were exceptional in their severity, suddenness and heterogeneity across industries. To study the upstream and downstream propagation of these industry-specific demand and supply shocks, we build a dynamic input-output model inspired by previous work on the economic response to natural disasters. We argue that standard production functions, at least in their most parsimonious parametrizations, are not adequate to model input substitutability in the context of Covid-19 shocks. We use a survey of industry analysts to evaluate, for each industry, which inputs were absolutely necessary for production over a short time period. We calibrate our model on the UK economy and study the economic effects of the lockdown that was imposed at the end of March and gradually released in May. Looking back at predictions that we released in May, we show that the model predicted aggregate dynamics very well, and sectoral dynamics to a large extent. We discuss the relative extent to which the models dynamics and performance was due to the choice of the production function or the choice of an exogenous shock scenario. To further explore the behavior of the model, we use simpler scenarios with only demand or supply shocks, and find that popular metrics used to predict a priori the impact of shocks, such as output multipliers, are only mildly useful.