We analyze the impact of development on flood fatalities using a new data set of 2,171 large floods in 92 countries between 1985 and 2008. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom that development results in fewer fatalities during natural disasters. Results indicating that higher income and better governance reduce fatalities during flood events do not hold up when unobserved country heterogeneity and within-country correlation of standard errors are taken into account. We find that income does have a significant, indirect effect on flood fatalities by affecting flood frequency and flood magnitude, but this effect is nonmonotonic, with net reductions in fatalities occurring only in lower income countries. We find little evidence that improved governance affects flood fatalities either directly or indirectly.

We consider a two-player differential game of international emissions to represent the interactions between two groups of countries, namely, developed and developing countries. We adopt a broader-than-usual definition of environmental cost for developing countries to account for their evolving involvement in tackling environmental externalities. Cooperative and non-cooperative solutions are characterized and contrasted. We find that it may not be the best course of action to push developing countries to reduce their emissions in the short term, and that cooperation may not create enough dividend, also in the short term, to be implementable.

Much of the debate between the European and US positions about the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods has been whether consumers perceive labels as a source of information or as a signal to change behavior. In this paper we provide an experimental framework for examining these roles of information and signaling. While previous studies have focused on the impact of labels on consumer behavior, our interest is also in what happens prior to the expression of aversion to GM-labeled foods. In particular, the experiment design allows the researcher to estimate a lower bound of the informational impact of labels on GM food aversion. The other novel feature of this paper is that, unlike earlier studies, it uses subjects from a developing country.

We analyze the performance of the Federal Industrial Inspection Program operated by the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) in Mexico City. We seek to answer three questions: What drives the inspections? What determines non-compliance? And what drives imposition of fines? We use firm-level data that identify certain characteristics of the firms, PROFEPA's inspections, compliance results and fines for all air polluting firms under the Program during the period January 2000–October 2008. We obtain three main results. First, PROFEPA's inspections have focused on larger firms devoted to industrial activities located in poor and dense municipalities. Second, past inspections were significant and have a high marginal effect on compliance. Third, the severity of the infraction was not relevant to the decision to impose a fine but rather to its amount.

The paper analyzes the impact of environmental information dissemination by an information agent in a product market duopoly. The information agent performs the task of disseminating information regarding a green and a polluting firm's environmental profiles to consumers differing in their preferences for the two firms’ products. The result reveals that, in the absence of information dissemination, the green firm earns a lower market share which necessitates the information agent's intervention to encourage the consumption of green product. Moreover, complete information dissemination regarding the green firm's environmental profile is sufficient to generate a higher market share for the green firm. The paper also finds that an increase in information dissemination regarding either of the two firms’ environmental profiles decreases environmental damage accrued to the society and encourages a greener consumption pattern. An eco-efficiency drive is shown to be self-corrective as it negates the need for the informational intervention.

We examine the substitutability of waste and scrap exported from different countries by estimating the export demand functions of China. In particular, we focus on the export of other ferrous waste and scrap (HS code 720449) and other waste, parings and scrap of plastics (HS code 391590). It is shown that the substitutability of these wastes and scraps is weak among the exporting countries. Our empirical results imply that a uniform ban on trading hazardous waste, represented by the Basel Ban, could be an inefficient environmental policy.