We use childhood exposure to disasters as a natural experiment inducing variations in adulthood outcomes. Following the fetal origin hypothesis, we hypothesize that children from households with greater famine exposure will have poorer health outcomes. Employing a unique dataset from Bangladesh, we test this hypothesis for the 1974–75 famine that was largely caused by increased differences between the price of coarse rice and agricultural wages, together with the lack of entitlement to foodgrains for daily wage earners. People from northern regions of Bangladesh were unequally affected by this famine that spanned several months in 1974 and 1975. We find that children surviving the 1974–75 famine have lower health outcomes during their adulthood. Due to the long-lasting effects of such adverse events and their apparent human capital and growth implications, it is important to enact and enforce public policies aimed at ameliorating the immediate harms of such events through helping the poor.

Ensuring energy access for rural households is crucial for global sustainable development. Technologies like liquefied petroleum gas, biogas, and efficient cookers are touted as solutions, yet their adoption remains limited despite their potential health, economic, and environmental benefits. We conducted a meta-analysis of 50 studies in developing countries, integrating contextual factors to explore gender and other determinants impacting rural energy transition. Our findings underscore socioeconomic status, social capital, environmental concerns, and gender dynamics as pivotal factors. Notably, women's involvement boosts adoption rates by 7.90 per cent, yet cultural barriers often sideline them from these processes. Thus, our recommendations stress addressing women's roles as energy technology users to foster inclusive energy transitions.

Policymakers frequently voice concerns that carbon pricing could impair economic development in the short run, especially in low-income countries such as Uganda. Using a consumer demand system for energy and food items, we assess how households’ welfare, and demand for food and energy, would respond to a carbon price of USD40/tCO2. We find welfare losses of 0.2–12 per cent of household expenditure on food and fuel, due to the carbon price. Average demand for electricity and kerosene decline by 11 and 20 per cent respectively, while firewood demand rises by 10 per cent on average. We observe shifts within food consumption baskets, with declines in the demand for meat & fish, and vegetables, alongside an increase in cereal consumption. Household nutrition is adversely impacted, with declines in protein and micronutrient intake across the population. Complementary social protection policies such as cash transfers are therefore required to ease adverse effects on economic development in Uganda.

We investigate the effect of women's political representation in the state legislative assembly and public administration on natural disaster mortality in 20 Indian states from 1981 to 2019. The paper combines two critical dimensions: political and administrative representation of women and disaster risk reduction. Results suggest that women's political representation reduces total disaster mortality after controlling socioeconomic and political covariates; however, the effects are statistically insignificant for the current and lag periods. We find that a one standard deviation increase in women's representation in public administration lowers total disaster mortality by 20.6 percentage points, which is 9.8 per cent of the sample mean. We observe the impacts of female administrative representation on gender-specific human development outcomes through reduced male and female disaster mortality, and we explain some mechanisms. Thus, women's political and administrative representation is crucial for addressing disaster mortality as it has major public health consequences.

Floods often displace people and exacerbate their access to finance, affecting the livelihood of daily wage workers in least-developed countries. In August 2017, Nepal experienced the heaviest rainfall in more than 60 years, severely flooding about 80 per cent of the land in the southern part of the country. Using the two-way fixed effects approach and an event study design, we evaluate the impact of severe flooding on the wages of agricultural workers. We show that the 2017 floods resulted in a 9–10 per cent decrease in cash wages among agricultural households while in-kind wages of agricultural laborers increased significantly after the floods, implying that in-kind wages helped mitigate the adverse effects of floods on cash wages. We also investigate changes in assistance, loan-seeking behavior, loan repayment, and collection behavior as mechanisms leading to the risk-mitigating behavior by farmers.

This paper analyzes inequities in the distribution of air pollution in Mexico at the detailed scale of localities. We find that air pollution increases in areas that experience a decline in socioeconomic status. We utilize 15 years of remote sensing data on fine particulate matter (smaller than 2.5 microns) for more than 116,500 localities across Mexico. Our panel data models show that localities that face a decline in socioeconomic status experience a 0.24–0.83 per cent increase in annual mean pollution concentrations. Our results hold up to controlling for changes within each municipality and instrumenting with broader municipality level socioeconomic status to test for ecological fallacy. We find that local air pollution inequities are reduced by political participation channels, but not as much by increased share of manufacturing activities due to polluters locating in poorer neighborhoods. Highly dense, urban municipalities witness higher inequities most likely due to traffic, construction, and agricultural fires.

The additionality of forest conservation interventions is frequently questioned. In particular, they are often considered to be located in places where forests are not threatened, which points to the existence of location biases. Revisiting this location bias concept, we conceptually distinguish potential and effective additionality and theoretically consider how the objectives of the implementer affect the siting choice of the forest conservation interventions and their additionality. Our theoretical intuition is that the choices of the implementers are influenced by the quality of institutions. Our results show that (1) the implementer's objective and local institutions may lead the implementer to select a site with low development potential and low forest threat, and (2) the selection of a site with low development potential, which is frequently presented as a location bias, does not necessarily preclude additionality.

This study applies surveys of business and household expenditure to draw inferences about the size of regional multipliers to assess the cascading economic impacts of the data-limited Indonesian tropical tuna fishery. The average business-level production multiplier was estimated at around 1.3 across survey respondents, while household-level consumption effects were considerably higher, with the total economic effect roughly three times larger than the production value. A statistical analysis using generalized additive models suggests that there is considerable difference in production multipliers across regions, driven by the individual characteristics of operators, such as revenue/profit, size of the boat, type of gear, and the class of the port where the business is located. This research has the potential to provide a practical management tool to measure flow-on economic impacts of a fishery when information necessary for more formal economic analysis is unavailable, such as for data-limited fisheries or small regional studies.

Based on a contingent valuation method survey on air quality improvement in northern China, we construct several subjective perception determinants of respondents' valuation uncertainty from both the demand and perceived supply sides. Using the individual-level uncertainty measurements initially proposed by Wang and He (2011) and their alternative transformations, we analyze how these factors of demand and perceived supply sides affect people's valuation uncertainty. Our results demonstrate the significant contribution of these determinants in explaining respondents' uncertainty. On the demand side, people who ‘don't know much’ about benefits-related factors have the highest level of uncertainty, and those claiming to ‘know nothing’ most often report the lowest level of uncertainty. On the supply side, people who either do not trust or are not satisfied with the control policies tend to be more certain of their valuation. The subsequent analyses also suggest that these results be interpreted as negative certainty, which is attributed to a lack of interest.

We investigate the effect of water quality on the educational outcomes of children aged 8–11 in 39 districts in five states in the Ganges Basin of India. Using data from the Centre for Pollution Control Board of India and the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2011–12, we study the effect of water quality in the Ganges Basin on the performance in three test scores. Our evidence suggests that faecal coliform levels in water sources above safety thresholds negatively affect reading and writing test scores. The effects of Nitrate-N and Nitrite-N in the water appear to be weaker compared to those of faecal coliform. The results establish that water pollution caused by excessive presence of faecal coliform is an important environmental factor in determining educational outcomes of children. High levels of faecal coliform in the water could be lowering cognitive abilities of the pollution-affected children through the channel of waterborne diseases.