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among energy consumption, pollution, employment, etc. associated with interin-
dustry production, and many others. The planning formulation, however, requires
yet additional normative assumptions of planning priorities and targets and of how
to measure proximity to planning targets. Not included at all are considerations of
uncertainty in the data, other analytical limitations of the analysis tools, scale and
aggregation, geographic scope and many other considerations that may be signifi-
cant in a policy making context. This is but one example of fashioning a policy
analysis in either an impact analysis or planning form, but the significance of
assumptions necessary will progress similarly with essentially any analysis
framework.
There are many contemporary policy issues where these illustrative
considerations apply. For example the application in Blair (
1979
) was to regional
energy planning questions. Today, the United States faces substantial analogous
questions such as the resilience and reliability of the nation's electric power
transmission and distribution system, the implications of the recent domestic
additions of oil and gas supply resulting from aggressive use of hydraulic fracturing
of shale gas resources, the challenges associated with substantial adoption of
renewable electric power generating technologies, and the nature and degree of
environmental regulation of energy production. These questions are different in
many ways from those faced in the late 1970s in the United States, but they still
possess many of the same analytical characteristics. For example, the considerable
differences among U.S. regions in terms of available energy supply resources and
characteristics of energy use, regulatory context, economic conditions and patterns
of economic structural change and the pace of that change would make any
modeling framework more challenging, particularly if the objective was to acquire
results at the national level.
Adapting the policy programming framework outlined earlier to these contem-
porary problems, utilizing either of the impact analysis or planning approach,
would benefit from enhancements to deal more effectively with current
circumstances. As an example, Miller and Blair (
2009
, Chap. 9) show that in
order to construct the matrix of direct energy coefficients, posed earlier as
D
e
e
*
e
such that
x
, presumes implicitly that for each energy type prices are
uniform across all consuming sectors for that type of energy. This may be inconse-
quential in some circumstances, but in highly developed economies where different
sectors use energy quite differently, actual interindustry energy prices will vary
considerably. For example, Griffin (
1976
) shows that the condition of uniform
interindustry prices across all energy-consuming sectors does no hold at all histori-
cally for the U.S. Economy. Weisz and Duchin (
2006
) show similar results. Miller
and Blair (
2009
, Chap. 9) show that a so-called hybrid units formulation of the
Leontief model accommodates non-uniform interindustry energy prices quite effec-
tively, but introduces other analytical issues, such as those noted earlier raised by
Dietzenbacher and Sage (
2006
).
x
ΒΌ
D
