The Vermont Transportation Energy Report: Vermont Clean Cities Coalition
The mission of the Vermont Clean Cities Coalition (VCCC) is to reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuels for transportation. This annual report provides policy makers with relevant and timely data on the status of fuel consumption, vehicle purchases, transportation expenditures, and travel behavior in Vermont. This information is intended to form the basis of data-driven policy discussions and initiatives.
Environmental Concern, Social Capital and the Social Context of Tailpipe Emissions-Related Knowledge in Northern Climates
Approximately a quarter of all greenhouse gases originate from motor vehicle tailpipe emissions (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007). Along with reducing household energy usage, changes in transportation behavior would have the most direct impact on lowering consumer output of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide. Despite increased levels of awareness surrounding global warming and interest in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there is little evidence that people have been willing to make changes in their lives to attain this collective goal. That technological improvements alone have not been able to reduce overall CO2 emissions draws attention to the motivations people have, if any, to reduce vehicle emissions as a matter of daily practice. This project has thus been motivated by three central questions: What do people know about vehicle tailpipe emissions? How does social context inform this knowledge and concern about environmental impacts, more generally?; and How do knowledge of vehicle tailpipe emissions and environmental concern grounded in social context affect individual transportation behavior?
Did the metamorphosis from Export Processing Zones to Special Economic Zones improve the efficiency of trade enclaves in India?
In this paper, the efficiency of seven conventional Special Economic Zones in India is analyzed, by adopting a stochastic production frontier technique, for the period between 1986–1987 and 2007–2008.Results indicate that although the efficiency scores of these enclaves have improved over the years, specifically with the introduction of the SEZ policy (2000–2001), it is far below the threshold level as identified in the literature. Besides, one can also observe a discrepancy emerging between better export earning zones and efficient zones. On the determinants side, policy intervention and large geographical area, accompanied by clustering of units, are found to have impacted the efficiency scores of these enclaves positively.