This study explores why international joint ventures (IJVs) based on the global South may meet with only partial success in nurturing local technological capability. The experience of China’s passenger-vehicle sector demonstrates that in the existence of a substantial technological capability gap between alliance partners, the IJV arrangement is likely to create a “passive” learning mode, and learners using this IJV arrangement may be able to strengthen their production capability but leaving their project execution and innovation capabilities largely undeveloped.

The Northeast region of China has been used as a testing ground for the creation
of a functioning wholesale electric power market. We describe the profile of generation
assets throughout the region and the ownership of plants. We calculate the 4-firm
Concentration Ratio (CR4) and the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI). The current
ownership structure exhibits modest concentration. We also describe the ownership
structure of those plants participating in the trial operation of the Northeast China
Regional Electricity Market. Ownership of this subset of plants is much more
concentrated. Arguably, this is a troublesome obstacle to instituting some form of
competitive bidding in the wholesale power market, and this may be one factor in the
poor outcome of the trial operation.

This paper is an empirical investigation of the effects of climate on the use of electricity by consumers and producers in urban and rural areas within China. It takes advantage of an unusual combination of temporal and regional data sets in order to estimate temperature, as well as price and income elasticities of electricity demand. The estimated positive temperature/electric power feedback implies a continually increasing use of energy to produce electric power which, in China, is primarily based on coal. In the absence of countervailing measures, this will contribute to increased emissions, increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and increases in greenhouse warming. © 2007 Elsevier B.V.

Hydrogen fueled transportation has been proposed as a low carbon alternative to the current gasoline powered fleet. Using a computable general equilibrium model of the world economy we explore the economic viability of hydrogen transportation in several different tax and carbon dioxide stabilization policy scenarios. We represent the capital, labor, fuel and other costs of hydrogen production and hydrogen powered vehicles in the economic model. We examine scenarios where the hydrogen fuel price and vehicle cost are varied over a wide range to evaluate what technology improvements would be needed, in terms of cost reductions, for hydrogen vehicles to penetrate the market. We consider scenarios with and without climate policy, and in competition with other reduced-carbon fuel substitutes, such as ethanol-blend fuels. We find that hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles could make a significant contribution to de-carbonization of the transportation fuel cycle if production of hydrogen itself is not carbon-intensive. Cost targets needed for the technology to penetrate in the USA are such that the hydrogen fuel would need to be in the range of 1 to 1.7 times the 1997 price of gasoline and the vehicle mark-up above an average fuel cell automobile would need no more than 1.3 to 1.5 times an average conventional vehicle. At the lower end of these cost ranges, the vehicle fleet could be competitive by 2020 but at the upper end we would only see entry of the fleet toward the end of the century. High fuel taxes in Europe makes fuel-efficient hydrogen fuel cell technology more competitive there than in the USA. Along with cost reductions, these results assume that technical issues are solved and that market hurdles of establishing the fuel distribution system are overcome. For those involved in hydrogen vehicle research this analysis provides cost targets that would need to met and, given they are achieved, an idea of when vehicles could be competitive and under what conditions.