Entrepreneurial Economics

Title:  Reflections  Regarding the Paradigm of Ecological Economics for Environmental Management.

This study draws attention to lack of knowledge regarding Ecological Economics amongst the growing number of professionals graduating in the field of Environmental Management.  The author offers a synthesis of the main principles of Ecological Economics, with particular focus on two of its main thinkers (N. Georgescu-Röegen e K. E. Boulding) and indicates why such knowledge is of fundamental importance for Environmental Management. The paper argues that environmental managers cannot ignore Ecological Economics; else they may fall prey to the myth of the win-win hypothesis and thus have an incomplete perception of the difficulties involved in establishing a sustainable society.

This study applies the proportional odds and partial proportional odds models for ordinal logistic regression to analyze household electricity consumption classes. Micro-data from households situated in the state of Rio de Janeiro during 2004 was used to measure the performance of the models in correctly classifying household electricity consumption classes via sociodemographic, electricity usage and dwelling characteristics. The strategy of using binary logistic regressions to test the main hypothesis of the proportional odds model, suggested by Bender and Grouven, was successful in identifying which of the independent variables could be estimated via the proportional odds assumption. Results indicate that the partial proportional odds models is slightly superior to the more restrictive approach. The study includes probabilistic examples to describe how changes in the independent variables affect the probability of a household belonging to specific classes of electricity consumption. Projections using the final model indicated that the approach may be useful for estimating aggregate household electricity consumption.