No Arabic abstract
This study aims to assess the net benefit of the kaptai dam on the Karnafuli river in Kaptai, Chittagong, Bangladesh. Kaptai Dam, the only hydroelectricity power source in Bangladesh, provides only 5% electricity demand of Bangladesh. The Dam is located on the Karnafuli River at Kaptai in Rangamati District, 65 km upstream from Chittagong. It is an earth-fill or embankment dam with a reservoir with a water storage capacity of 11,000 skm. Though the Dams primary purpose is to generate electricity, it became a reservoir of water used for fishing and tourism. To find the net benefit value and estimate the environmental costs and benefits, we considered the environmental net benefit from 1962 to 1997. We identify the costs of Kaptai Dam, including its establishment cost, operational costs, the costs of lives that have been lost due to conflicts, and environmental costs, including loss of biodiversity, loss of land uses, and loss of human displacements. Also, we assess the benefits of electricity production, earnings from fisheries production, and gain from tourism to Kaptai Lake. The findings show that the Dam contributes tremendous value to Bangladesh. As a source of hydroelectricity, the Kaptai Dam is a source of clean energy, and its value might have been worthy of this Dam produced a significant portion of the electricity. However, providing less than 5% of the national demand for electricity followed by various external and sensitive costs, the Dam hardly contributes to the Bangladesh economy. This study thus recommends that Bangladesh should look for other sources of clean energy that have no chances of eco-political conflicts.
A majority portion of the slum people is involved in service sectors. The city dwellers are somehow dependent on the services of those people. Pure drinking water and hygiene is a significant concern in the slums. Because of the lack of these two items, the slum people are getting sick, which causes the interruption to their services. In addition, they can transmit the diseases they suffer from to the service receiver. With these aims, this study endeavors to explore the willingness to pay of the households who receive the services of the slum people using the mixed-method techniques. Under this technique, 265 households were surveyed through face-to-face interviews, and 10 KIIs were conducted with slum people. The studys findings suggest that the households showed their willingness to pay for the improvement of the water and sanitation facilities in the slums. However, the KIIs findings show that the slum people are not willing to pay for the improvement as they claim that government should finance the project of improving water and sanitation facilities in the slums.
Conventional wisdom suggests that large-scale refugees pose security threats to the host community or state. With massive influx of Rohingyas in Bangladesh in 2017 resulting a staggering total of 1.6 million Rohingyas, a popular discourse emerged that Bangladesh would face severe security threats. This article investigates the security experience of Bangladesh in case of Rohingya influx over a three-year period, August 2017 to August 2020. The research question I intend to address is, has Bangladesh experienced security threat due to massive Rohingya influx? If so in what ways? I test four security threat areas: societal security, economic security, internal security, and public security. I have used newspaper content analysis over past three years along with interview data collected from interviewing local people in coxs bazar area where the Rohingya camps are located. To assess if the threats are low level, medium level, or high level, I investigated both the frequency of reports and the way they are interpreted. I find that Bangladesh did not experience any serious security threats over the last three years. There are some criminal activities and offenses, but these are only low-level security threat at best. My research presents empirical evidence that challenges conventional assertions that refugees are security threats or challenges to the host states.
Tradable mobility credit (TMC) schemes are an approach to travel demand management that have received significant attention in the transportation domain in recent years as a promising means to mitigate the adverse environmental, economic and social effects of urban traffic congestion. In TMC schemes, a regulator provides an initial endowment of mobility credits (or tokens) to all potential travelers. In order to use the transportation system, travelers need to spend a certain amount of tokens (tariff) that could vary with their choice of mode, route, departure time etc. The tokens can be bought and sold in a market that is managed by and operated by a regulator at a price that is dynamically determined by the demand and supply of tokens. This paper proposes and analyzes alternative market models for a TMC system (focusing on market design aspects such as allocation/expiration of credits, rules governing trading, transaction costs, regulator intervention, price dynamics), and develops a methodology to explicitly model the disaggregate behavior of individuals within the market. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted within a departure time context for the morning commute problem to compare the performance of the alternative designs relative to congestion pricing and a no control scenario. The simulation experiments employ a day to day assignment framework wherein transportation demand is modeled using a logit-mixture model and supply is modeled using a standard bottleneck model. The paper addresses a growing and imminent need to develop methodologies to realistically model TMCs that are suited for real-world deployments and can help us better understand the performance of these systems and the impact in particular, of market dynamics.
We investigate structural change in the PR China during a period of particularly rapid growth 1998-2014. For this, we utilize sectoral data from the World Input-Output Database and firm-level data from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database. Starting with correlation laws known from the literature (Fabricants laws), we investigate which empirical regularities hold at the sectoral level and show that many of these correlations cannot be recovered at the firm level. For a more detailed analysis, we propose a multi-level framework, which is validated with empirically. For this, we perform a robust regression, since various input variables at the firm-level as well as the residuals of exploratory OLS regressions are found to be heavy-tailed. We conclude that Fabricants laws and other regularities are primarily characteristics of the sectoral level which rely on aspects like infrastructure, technology level, innovation capabilities, and the knowledge base of the relevant labor force. We illustrate our analysis by showing the development of some of the larger sectors in detail and offer some policy implications in the context of development economics, evolutionary economics, and industrial organization.
The existing theorization of development economics and transition economics is probably inadequate and perhaps even flawed to accurately explain and analyze a dual economic system such as that in China. China is a country in the transition of dual structure and system. The reform of its economic system has brought off a long period of transformation. The allocation of factors is subjected to the dualistic regulation of planning or administration and market due to the dualistic system, and thus the signal distortion will be a commonly seen existence. From the perspective of balanced and safe growth, the institutional distortions of population birth, population flow, land transaction and housing supply, with the changing of export, may cause great influences on the production demand, which includes the iterative contraction of consumption, the increase of export competitive cost, the widening of urban-rural income gap, the transferring of residents income and the crowding out of consumption. In view of the worldwide shift from a conservative model with more income than expenditure to the debt-based model with more expenditure than income and the need for loose monetary policy, we must explore a basic model that includes variables of debt and land assets that affecting money supply and price changes, especially in China, where the current debt ratio is high and is likely to rise continuously. Based on such a logical framework of dualistic system economics and its analysis method, a preliminary calculation system is formed through the establishment of models.