There is growing evidence that early life conditions are important for outcomes during adolescence, including cognitive development and education. Economic conditions at the time children enter school are also important. We examine these relationships for young adolescents living in a low-income drought-prone pastoral setting in Kenya using historical rainfall patterns captured by remote sensing as exogenous shocks. Past rainfall shocks measured as deviations from local long-term averages have substantial negative effects on the cognitive development and educational achievement of girls. Results for the effects of rainfall shocks on grades attained, available for both girls and boys, support that finding. Consideration of additional outcomes suggests the effects of rainfall shocks on education are due to multiple underlying mechanisms including persistent effects on the health of children and the wealth of their households, underscoring the potential value of contemporaneous program and policy responses to such shocks.

Using data from the period 1996–2010, this paper identifies the nature of constraints that make India, which is one of the emerging environmental goods and services (EGS) exporters, unable to realize its export potential of environmental goods (EG). The empirical results show that the growth of India's exports of EG was negatively affected by ‘behind the border’ constraints such as weak infrastructure and institutions, while the effect of ‘explicit beyond the border’ constraints such as partner countries' tariffs and exchange rates on the exports of EG was relatively small. The reduction of India's trading partners' ‘implicit beyond the border’ constraints such as weak infrastructure and institutions significantly contributed toward India's exports of EG, especially during the period 2005–2010.

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are quite diverse in terms of various development metrics, but are uniformly vulnerable both to macroeconomic shocks and to changes in the biodiversity that supports fisheries and tourism. This special section assembles a set of papers that analyze international demand for the natural resources associated with the two sectors, and the factors that lie behind changes in their supply. Since each stresses the resource base, albeit in different ways, we argue that limits on tourist pressure will be as important as limits on allowable fish catches in the future. We identify the challenge for SIDS as the need to implement an integrated, sustainable resource management strategy that allows biological resources to be allocated to their highest valued uses, while respecting the interests of those with prior rights to those resources.

This paper aims at assessing the determinants of Amazon deforestation, emphasizing the role played by off-farm income. Initially an economic model is provided which relates off-farm income to deforestation patterns. Subsequently, empirical implications are tested using data from the 2006 Brazilian Agricultural Census. Estimation results suggest that higher off-farm incomes are associated with reduced deforestation rates. In fact, higher off-farm incomes might increase the opportunity cost associated with agricultural activities. The latter option becomes less attractive and farmers dedicate less time to farm activities, thereby reducing deforestation pressure. Results also show that smallholders respond less to the increase in the returns from off-farm activities when compared to largeholders, which matches our hypothesis of labor market imperfections regarding off-farm activities.

Preparing regional development strategies for the Amazon Basin is a vexing task for policymakers. Forests continue to fall and agriculture to move in to a region with patchy (in terms of agronomic potential) yet broadly nutrient-poor soils. The spatial distribution of soil types is not well mapped at finer scales relevant for agriculture. There is, moreover, little evidence about how farm land use or farm household welfare varies by soil quality in this frontier setting. Despite these information gaps, regional planners continue to use soils as a basis for policy action, some of which may influence future options for the Amazon. This paper uses a farm-level bioeconomic model that captures soil-quality-specific degrading effects of agricultural activities to assess the impacts of soil quality differences on deforestation, use of cleared land, and smallholder income in the western Brazilian Amazon. Focusing on an archetypical area farm with reasonable market access but limited access to labor and credit, simulations show soil quality mattered more for income than for deforestation or land use, although extremely cash-strapped farmers on poor-quality soils could face displacement. Pasture dominated farm land use across all soil types as farm forest disappeared within a generation on successfully established farms. Good- and (viable) poor-soil farms had slightly slower deforestation rates than their medium-soil counterparts – rich-soil farms shifting small amounts of area (and labor) to the more nutrient- and labor-intensive annuals, and (even viable) poor-soil farms lacking sufficient resources to clear and farm additional land. Farms with good soils could generate about 44 per cent more income than their viable poor-soil counterparts, but the lower-income level still surpassed thresholds for meeting food security and other needs. At no combination of income level and soil quality explored did the (simulated) farmer find it worthwhile to purchase and apply chemical fertilizer; nutrients came instead from secondary forest fallow, whose area rose or fell in step with annual cropping area. The implications of these results for land-use zoning, forest conservation, poverty alleviation, and other policies are discussed.

Comprehensive Investment (CI) may provide an indicator of future changes in a country's per capita consumption. The authors explore the utility of the CI indicator for Australia by constructing CI data since 1861 and by estimating their relationship with changes in future consumption over periods of 50 years ahead. The CI measures include changes in natural, produced and human capital, and make allowance for exogenous technological progress. The results are used to consider how Australia's natural capital exploitation influenced the consumption of future generations. Further, the authors gauge if low CI relative to other leading OECD countries resulted in lower consumption levels in Australia over time than feasible, had it saved more.

This paper analyses the effect of environmental standards on aggregate employment in the presence of a productivity effect in a multi-sector general equilibrium framework of an open economy. The productivity effect is generated among the skilled and unskilled workers as an improvement in the environmental quality improves their health, leading to an increase in their productivity. Though the productivity effect initially lowers labour demand as labour requirement per unit of production falls, a standard may raise employment depending on the parametric configurations. In this paper, we identify the role of this productivity effect on the change in employment and show that it may actually improve the chances of an employment expansion.

People have a marginal role in managing forests located in the vicinity of their villages in Northern India. This situation is scrutinized in this paper by studying strategic play of forest users. Thereto, a 1 versus n−1 game of people's participation in forest management is estimated for three institutional and historical distinct cases at the State and village level. Critical discount factors are derived to verify whether incentives exist for villagers to mutually participate in managing commonly used forests. This paper finds such incentives in varying degrees for games at the State level and for games in 23 of the 32 considered villages.

One of the first lessons that students of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) learn is to ask whether projects or policies which they are studying generate additional benefits or costs, relative to the status quo. They are also told to be very careful in defining the project/policy which is the subject of their analysis. In my view, the ecological concept of resilience fails the CBA test, when applied to the study of economic and social systems, because it offers no additional insights to those we have already, and appears to be poorly defined.

This paper addresses factors influencing agricultural land use in rural households in El Salvador, with particular attention paid to the effects of income. Two linkages between the area a household farms and income per capita are critical. First, there is a precautionary demand for land that can be used for subsistence agriculture and this demand declines as income rises. Second, the area a household is able to farm goes up as income increases. Together, these two linkages imply that the relationship between agricultural land use and per capita income takes the shape of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC).

Using panel data collected since 1995 in four biennial surveys of a nationally representative sample of rural households, we have analyzed agricultural land use at the household level. Evidence of an EKC relating farmed area to per capita income has been obtained. In addition, other factors influencing a household's use of natural resources have been examined.

Advances in biotechnology have made available gene-manipulation techniques that enable the protection of genetic material from unauthorized use and the prevention of self-supply of commercial seeds by farmers—in order to allow enhanced appropriation of the values of innovation in agricultural R&D. These techniques have become known as Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTs).

This paper forecasts the potential impact of wide-spread adoption of GURTs by the providers of HYV seeds on the yield development in developing countries. To do so, it assesses (1) the effects of enhanced appropriation through GURTs on the technological expansion at the yield frontier and (2) the effects of technological protection of value-adding traits through GURTS on the diffusion of yield gains from the frontier to developing countries. These assessments are based on a particular hypothesis, which is that GURTs will replicate across most staple crops the experiences that were made with a previous use restriction technology (hybridization) in only a few crops. The estimation of impacts is carried out as a simulation and is based on expansion and diffusion parameters estimated for hybrid seeds over a 38-year period. It shows that the impact of GURTs on developing countries' yields will vary considerably. Specifically, those countries that currently have the lowest yields would be most adversely affected in their future yield development by the wide-spread use of GURTs.

This study estimates depreciation values for timber extraction activities in the Brazilian Amazon for 1990 and 1995. A generalized approach following Vincent and Hartwick (1997) is applied enabling us to calculate depreciation based on all three methods proposed in the literature. We also calculate Hotelling rents for timber as a whole and for mahogany alone. Apart from the expected differences in the results for each method, the results show substantially low depreciation estimates as a direct consequence of the high timber stocks and scarcity perception by economic agents due to the lack of property rights in the region. For mahogany alone we obtain substantially higher values. We conclude that if scarcity rents are not fully perceived, or they really do not exist in such huge supply conditions as our estimates may suggest, charges related to other forest services are fundamental to make environmental accounting an useful tool for planning in the Amazonian context.

This paper studies multilateral and unilateral policy reforms of environmental R&D subsidies and emission taxes in a two-country Cournot model with oligopolistic interdependence. The analysis indicates, inter alia, that there is a potential family of multilateral and unilateral policy reforms which can be set by pollution-intensive and pollution-moderate countries to reduce global emissions. In particular, the analysis suggests that a unilateral increase in the subsidy in the pollution-moderate country may reduce global emissions. The multilateral policy reform of the subsidy and tax in the pollution-intensive country can also reduce global emissions and increase welfare under certain conditions. The role of product differentiation in the context of policy reform is also examined.

This paper investigates the theory and practice of adjusting national income and product accounts for the stock and depletion of mineral assets. These green income adjustments can have a significant impact on the accounts of mineral-based developing economies and the macroeconomic policies that might be derived from these accounts. We propose that the popular methods used to adjust the accounts for the impacts of mineral assets and depletion are upwardly biased, and we present alternative stock valuation and depletion formulas that are empirically supported variants of the formulas currently in use.

In this paper we evaluate the long-run sustainability of China's Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) by investigating the determinants of farmers’ self-predicted post-program land use decisions. We use data from a household survey conducted in 2005, with a particular focus on a dependent variable that reflects farmers’ ordinal responses to a question about their probability of converting the enrolled lands back to cultivation after the program ends. First, we find that targeting the program on steeper sloped and lower quality plots can significantly decrease the probability of reconversion. Second, there is a significant and robust household income structure effect on the reconversion probability. Third, participating households with the right to decide what to plant on enrolled land have a higher probability of maintaining the reforested land after the program ends. Finally, subsidy shortfall has a positive influence on the probability of reconversion.

An ancillary benefit of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) mitigation refers to a benefit derived from GHG mitigation that is in addition to the reduction in adverse impacts of global climate change. One type of ancillary benefits of GHG mitigation is reduced local conventional pollutants, which is associated with improved health. Middle-income countries like Thailand are in unique positions to obtain large ancillary health gains from reduced local conventional pollutants when GHG is mitigated by curbing fossil fuel consumption.

We study the effects of providing subsidies to the fisheries in small island developing states (SIDS), where fisheries are important to both the food security and livelihoods of the populations. By analyzing data on current and potential catch and computing the potential catch losses from the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of SIDS, we find that, collectively, SIDS have currently overfished their waters to the extent that their current catch is just under 50 per cent of the maximum catch potential. This catch loss results in direct and indirect food security impacts in terms of losses in healthy, varied and nutrient-rich food, revenues, incomes and economic impacts in SIDS. Our results also demonstrate that capacity-enhancing subsidies contribute to overfishing while the effect of good subsidies is unclear and needs further analysis.

A growing literature documents the positive impact of community management on non-timber forest conservation but not on the condition of timber forests, which require higher management intensity than do non-timber forests. Using ground-level data of the age composition of trees and the management activities of timber forests and applying a rigorous econometric technique to deal with the endogeneity of handing over forest use rights to the community, we find that a longer period of community management is associated with a higher density of pole-size trees, indicating that community management facilitates the rehabilitation of timber forests. We also find that population pressure leads to deforestation under state management but encourages forest management under community management.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the greenhouse gases (GHG) emission target adopted by Argentina. It contains a summary of the process that led to the formulation of the emission target, including GHG inventories, macroeconomic and sectoral projections, and mitigation options. Fixed and dynamic indexes such as the Carbon Intensity Index are discussed, concluding that the latter is not appropriate for most developing countries. This is the case, in particular, for countries whose GHG emissions are not solely dependent on GDP growth, but also on other variables, such as international prices and market conditions for their agricultural products. The index recommended for Argentina was based on the square root of GDP. It went a step further by producing, for the chosen level of reduction, not only a positive relation between GDP and allowable emissions, but also a relation of the same sign between GDP and emission reductions.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the forestry sector are estimated to be 8.4 GtCO2-eq./year or about 17% of the global emissions. We estimate that the cost for reducing deforestation is low in Africa and several times higher in Latin America and Southeast Asia. These cost estimates are sensitive to the uncertainties of how much unsustainable high-revenue logging occurs, little understood transaction and program implementation costs, and barriers to implementation including governance issues. Due to lack of capacity in the affected countries, achieving reduction or avoidance of carbon emissions will require extensive REDD-plus programs. Preliminary REDD-plus Readiness cost estimates and program descriptions for Indonesia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guyana and Mexico show that roughly one-third of potential REDD-plus mitigation benefits might come from avoided deforestation and the rest from avoided forest degradation and other REDD-plus activities.