In order to explore the conditions for successful communal irrigation management, this study investigates the determinants of household contributions to the cleaning of irrigation channels and the availability of water. By using household-level data collected in a large-scale gravity irrigation scheme in Uganda, whose management was transferred from the government to the community, we find that household contributions to the cleaning of irrigation channels are determined by the scarcity of irrigation water, the opportunity cost of labor and the private benefit associated with plot size. We also find that the availability of irrigation water increases in the tertiary irrigation canal where the coefficient of variation of plot size is large, which may indicate that farmers of larger plots are particularly active in water management. These findings suggest that farmers are responsive to private benefits and, hence, the support of the government for communities to implement punishment may be effective for successful irrigation management.

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) support livelihoods in rural communities through provision of food, fuel, materials, medicines and income from sales. We estimated the contribution of NTFPs to rural household income in Zambia, and used a two-stage tobit alternative model to identify the factors associated with participation in NTFP markets. NTFPs accounted for 35 per cent of household income for participating households, second only to trading. Human capital variables and the value of assets were found to be significant determinants of both participation in business activities related to NTFPs and the associated household income, and the poor were more dependent on NTFPs than wealthier households. The effect of average rainfall underscores the role that NTFPs play in providing a safety net during periods of low crop yields. Rural development policies should recognize the role played by NTFPs in rural livelihoods and the need to balance welfare improvement and sustainable forest management.

Rural households in developing countries depend on crops, forest extraction and other income sources for their livelihoods, but these livelihood contributions are sensitive to climate change. Combining socioeconomic data from about 8,000 smallholder households across the tropics with gridded precipitation and temperature data, we find that households have the highest crop income at 21°C temperature and 2,000 mm precipitation. Forest incomes increase on both sides of this agricultural maximum. We further find indications that crop income declines in response to weather shocks while forest income increases, suggesting that households may cope by reallocating inputs from agriculture to forests. Forest production may thus be less sensitive than crop production to climatic fluctuations, gaining comparative advantage in extreme climates and under weather anomalies. This suggests that well-managed forests might help poor rural households to cope with and adapt to future climate change.

We estimate the impact of large, catastrophic floods on internal armed conflict using global data on large floods between 1985 and 2009. The results suggest that while large floods did not ignite new conflict, they fueled existing armed conflicts. Floods and armed conflict are endogenously determined, and we show that empirically addressing this endogeneity is important. The estimated effects of floods on conflict prevalence are substantially larger in specifications that control for the endogeneity of floods, suggesting that treating natural disasters as exogenous phenomena may underestimate their impacts on sociopolitical outcomes.

Low demand for safe water may partly result from a perceived distaste towards or the inconvenience of treatment methods. This paper analyzes preferences for water quality improvements in peri-urban Phnom Penh. The authors first analyze data from a discrete choice experiment in which respondents selected their preferred alternative from generic options varying in cost, taste acceptability, effectiveness against diarrhea and quantity of water treated. The choice patterns suggest that demand for water treatment is highly dependent on taste acceptability. The authors also use double-blinded taste tests to show that respondents are sensitive to one common taste in treated drinking water, that stemming from chlorine disinfection. While many compounds (natural and anthropogenic) may contribute to taste problems in drinking water, the lack of alignment between household preferences for taste and water safety may play a role in the low use of household water treatment methods in many settings.

This paper analyzes how a tax/subsidy policy affects consumers' behavior when choosing between green (pollution-free goods) and conventional products, and its effects on welfare when a proportion of consumers have strong preferences for green goods. We analyze a Hotelling's linear city model where final products by two firms are symmetric in all dimensions except for the externality their production process generates. Our efficiency comparisons suggest that, under a setting of horizontal product differentiation, an environmental regulation (either on polluting firms or consumers buying their products) yields higher social welfare than the absence of policy. Moreover, the proportion of consumers who prefer green products affects the welfare gains from a subsidy or tax policy.

This paper examines whether green Official Development Aid (ODA) has a significant role in mitigating carbon emissions in recipient countries, and if institutional quality matters for the effectiveness of green ODA. For 86 green ODA recipient countries over the period 2003–2014, we explore the nexus between green ODA, institutions and carbon emissions. By using a two-step system generalized method of moment (GMM), we find that green ODA overall has no direct association with the mitigation of carbon emissions. However, when institutional quality indices are included, we found a significant effect of institutional quality on the effectiveness of green ODA. In general, green ODA is associated with higher carbon emissions in countries with poor institutions. In particular, green ODA is effective in mitigating carbon emissions when channeled to countries that enjoy higher economic freedom as well as more freedom from corruption. Results are mixed for the rule of law.

This paper examines determinants of output and input market participation. It employs propensity score matching techniques to evaluate the impact of market participation on pigeonpea diversity and household welfare, using cross-sectional data of 333 households from Kenya. Results show that input and output market participation decisions are quite distinct. Output market participation is influenced by household demographics, farm size and radio ownership, while input market participation is determined by farm size, bicycle ownership and access to a salaried income. The findings reveal a positive and significant impact of output market participation on pigeonpea diversity, while input market participation had a negative and significant impact on diversity. The results indicate that output market participants have significantly higher food security status than non-participants, in line with the general findings of the literature. However, no significant impact is found between indicators of household welfare and input market participation.

State-owned forest enterprises (SOFEs) in northeast China play important roles both in timber production and in the maintenance of ecological security. This paper examines the effects of a number of policy measures on the behavioral choices of the SOFEs. The results show that the extent to which SOFE supervising authorities emphasized the improvement of forest resources in their annual evaluation of the SOFEs had significant impacts on the harvest and investment decisions and the development of forest resources. Promotion of the management and utilization of non-timber resources, as well as reforms aiming to increase the efficiency of forest protection and management, reduced timber harvests and increased investment, which in turn led to improvements of forest resources, although the effects were small. In contrast, reforms aimed at timber harvest and afforestation activities actually contributed to increasing timber harvest, which affected the development of the forest resources negatively.

Predicting residential water demand for non-connected households that obtain connections is a crucial issue for water planners in developing countries. We propose a technique derived from Heckman (1976) to accurately measure the expected increase in water use due to access to tap water while controlling for differences in characteristics between connected and non-connected households. Illustration is made on a cross section of 246 households from Dakar, Senegal. We show that getting a tap connection induces an expected increase in water use of 26 L per capita per day.

Mechanisms generating patterns in spatial domains have been extensively studied in biology, but also in economics in the context of new economic geography. The Turing mechanism or Turing diffusion-induced instability has been central to the understanding of forces which endogenously generate spatial patterns, but in a context where agents do not explicitly optimize an objective. The present paper reviews tools to study, in the spirit of Turing's analysis, a mechanism generating optimal diffusion-induced instability where optimizing agents generate optimal agglomerations. By extending the maximum principle to the optimal control of partial differential equations, it is shown how under certain conditions it will be optimal to design controls so that the price-quantity system implied by the costate–state functions of the optimal control of distributed parameter systems induces optimal spatial patterns. These methods might be useful in studying pattern formation both in problems of resource management and of economic development.

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.

The design and implementation of environmental policy often involve more than one pollutant, and must consider pollution as a byproduct of the production of marketable output. In this paper, we test the implicit assumption in the empirical literature that (1) production of marketable output, pollution and abatement are separable, and (2) different pollutants can be abated separately. Using unique plant-level data in India, we reject the null hypotheses of separability between marketable output and pollutants, and between different pollutants. Firms must incur abatement costs for reducing pollution levels. In addition, complement and substitute relationships between water pollutants are demonstrated with statistical significance.

This article investigates the linkages between economic growth, energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in India by analysing the structure of production and consumption in the Indian economy. We begin with an examination of the consumption pattern of six different income classes, three each in urban and rural India, and then estimate the direct and indirect energy and CO2 emission coefficients for supporting production in various sectors. This provides us with a basis for estimating the energy and emission content of the consumption baskets of the different income classes in India. CO2 emissions are projected to increase from 0.18 tonnes of carbon (tC) per capita in 1990 to about 0.62 tC per capita in 2020 under the reference scenario which corresponds to a GDP growth rate of 5.5% per annum. We then analyse scenarios of technology improvement in which emissions are reduced to 0.47 tC per capita in 2020. Our projection methodology takes into account the changes in aggregate consumpti on pattern due to mobility of the population across the income classes and from rural to urban areas, besides the increase in per capita consumption of all classes.

The paper describes a number of developing country applications of economic instruments (EIs), focusing on how policy makers—mostly in Asia and La tin America—have addressed implementation problems. The informational and institutional demands of EIs can be as great as with regulations; in any event, the former are mostly used to complement not replace the latter. Consideration of political acc eptability has conditioned both instrument design (e.g. grandfathering of tradable permits, non-compliance fees rather than simple pollution charges) and phasing of implementation (e.g. starting with local experimentation, setting low initial charge rates). With the advance of market-oriented economic reforms in the developing world, the policy and institutional environment should become more conducive to applying EIs; with greater political openness in many countries, the scope for involving the media, n on-governmental organizations, and the public at large in environmental enforcement (e.g., through information disclosure programmes) should also increase.

Modeling the factors determining ecological and economic value gives rise to conceptual and methodological problems. Economic valuation typically focuses on use value in the short run, whether within or outside the market. Ecologists, however, are more concerned with ecological values, which provide an underlying long-run notion of value interpreted in a more general sense. This paper investigates the nature of the link between these two aspects of value in the context of a wetland in Northern India, which is also designated as a Ramsar site and a national park. A dynamic simulation model in a ‘STELLA’ environment is set up to understand the linkages between underlying ecological relationships and economic value emerging from them. The simulations point towards a critical dependence of economic value (direct and indirect income derived from the park) on ecological health indices. A non-linearity is to be seen in the impact of an increase in ecological health indices on tourist traffic. This responsive or elasticity with respect to ecological health is more at higher values of the indices, indicating thereby that once efforts at conservation increase the attractiveness of the park above a certain level, the impact may be cumulative and returns in terms of income may rise more than proportionately.

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis holds that economic growth leads to increases in pollution in early stages of development, but is a significant driver of environmental improvements as income levels increase. Most empirical applications have focused on estimating a reduced form equation in which the measure of environmental degradation is posited as a non-linear function of income. In this paper we develop a structural production model based on an output distance function to investigate the EKC hypothesis for CO2 in a panel of industrialized countries from 1971 to 2000. This structural approach allows for the decomposition of the observed emission changes into the scale, composition, and productivity effects, thus providing additional insight into the interlinked processes of economic growth and environmental change. The findings from our preferred model indicate that for most countries, the CO2-saving productivity effect is not large enough to offset the CO2-producing scale effect.

The paper analyzes the economic impacts of climate change-induced fluctuations on the performance of Ethiopia's agriculture, using a countrywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. We model the impacts on agriculture using a Ricardian model, where current agricultural production is modelled as a function of temperature and precipitation, among other things, and where future agriculture is assumed to follow the same climate function. The effect of overall climate change is projected to be relatively benign until approximately 2030, but will become considerably worse thereafter. Our simulation results indicate that, over a 50-year period, the projected reduction in agricultural productivity may lead to reductions in average income of some 20 per cent compared with the outcome that would have prevailed in the absence of climate change. This indicates that adaptation policies – both government planned and those that ease autonomous adaptation by farmers – will be crucial for Ethiopia's future development.

This paper contains a critical assessment of the claim that NNP can be used for welfare comparisons. The analysis assumes that national accounts are comprehensive (in particular ‘greened’ by taking into account environmental amenities and natural resource depletion), but does not assume optimal resource allocation. The general conclusion is that greater NNP corresponds to welfare enhancement only if net investment flows are revalued. Real utility-NNP and real measurable NNP made comparable across time by means of a consumer price index allow for such revaluation, and thus indicate welfare improvement.

We employ a laboratory experiment to investigate the effects of environmental context and termination uncertainty on decisions in a dynamic game with a public bad. Every period the subjects decide on their own production level that generates private revenue and ‘emissions’. Emissions accumulate over time and act as a public bad. We characterize and use as benchmarks the Markov perfect equilibrium and social optimum and find that observed decisions are between the two predictions. We find no significant effect of termination uncertainty on decisions in any except the last few rounds where, in a fixed-end setting, subjects allocate their entire endowment to production. We find a strong effect of environmental context which partially substitutes for experience. The effect of experience is most pronounced in the fixed-end treatment where production allocations and the level of the public bad become lower after the restart.