Urban, Rural and Regional Economics

Ahmad Fakrul Ramli · Zarina Ab Muis · Wai Shin Ho · Ahmad Muzammil Idris · Aminullah Mohtar ·Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy ·2019

The energy sector has grown significantly over the years, causing an increase in carbon emission that has led to serious global warming problems. Consequently, electric vehicles (EVs) have become a favourable solution in the transportation sector due to their green technology attributes. This paper aims to apply the Carbon Emission Pinch Analysis (CEPA) method to the transportation sector in Iskandar Malaysia. The modified CEPA method is applied by constructing a composite curve for transportation modes and the total carbon emission was plotted in order to study the minimum electricity requirement that needs to be generated to implement the use of EVs. Road and rail transportation were considered in the transport composite curve based on the current policies available and to achieve the new carbon emission target by the year 2025. The alternatives available to reduce carbon emission in Iskandar Malaysia include increasing public transport modal share; fuel switching from petrol and diesel to natural gas and biofuels; and increasing transport efficiency via plug-in hybrid and EVs. Four scenarios were established and evaluated based on economic and environmental aspects. As a result, Scenario 4 which considered all policies available (transport management, fuel switching and fuel efficiency) have showed the most promising fuel mix for future transportation demands. An estimated total amount of 0.25 TJ of electricity is needed for EV implementation with a total estimated cost of RM 1.3 billion. The total carbon emission for this scenario is 1101.96 kt-CO2. This research can benefit the Government, town planners, or policy makers, for preliminary energy planning.

Gabriel Hoh Teck Ling · Pau Chung Leng and Chin Siong Ho ·Economies ·2019 ·JEL: D01; D02; D23; D62; K11; O21; P25; Q24; Q26

There are severe issues of public open space (POS) underinvestment and overexploitation. However, few studies have been conducted on the property rights structure and its impacts on rural commons governance, specifically concerning local neighbourhood residential POS quality and sustainability. The social-ecological system framework and the new institutional economics theory were employed to examine the local diverse property rights system and its e_x000B_ects on the emergence of POS dilemmas. Rural commons covering neighbourhood residential Country Lease (CL) and Native Title (NT) POS from the districts of Kota Kinabalu and Penampang, Sabah Malaysia were selected. A mixed-method phenomenological case study, involving multi-stakeholders’ perspectives across public-private-user sectors, was employed. This study revealed four main interconnected property rights issues, including attenuated rights, incomplete rights, maladaptive rights, and security-based de facto perceptive rights, under the complex state-private regime, which incentivise the opportunistic behaviour of individuals in externalising POS commons dilemmas. The findings further inferred that the local diverse property rights issues and POS dilemmas caused, and are associated with, other rights issues and dilemmas, forming a rights-dilemmas nexus. Not only do the institutional failures actuate POS dilemmas, but the former also engender other forms of property rights failures, while the latter cause other POS dilemmas. This paper suggests policy and management insights to public o_x000E_cials, in which the importance of the institutional-social-POS behavioural factor and the re-engineering of POS governance via adaptive property rights realignment are emphasised.