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.

The political incentives of local officials affect their preferences for policy options. This study examines the impact of the convening cycle of Provincial Communist Party Congresses (PCPCs) in China on pollution emission intensity. Based on the data of 281 cities and city officials from 2003 to 2014, the present study finds strong evidence of a political pollution cycle manifesting as significant increases in pollution emission intensity before PCPCs followed by visible decreases after PCPCs. PCPCs provide city officials with strong political incentives to pursue short-term economic performance before congresses, which leads to a surge in pollution emission intensity. The difference in pollution emission intensity before and after the PCPCs reveals the existence of such political incentives. The findings suggest that a significant relationship exists between the political incentives of city officials and environmental pollution. Therefore, the effective governance of environmental pollution must involve changing the incentive structure of city officials.

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.

We analyse the relationship between individuals' subjective wellbeing (SWB) and measures of their country's sustainability. SWB data are sourced from the World Values Survey; sustainability is measured by ecological footprint (EF) and by components of the World Bank's adjusted net savings (ANS) series. ANS, a measure of weak sustainability, represents changes in a country's capital stock including financial, physical, human and natural capital. We show that an increase in strong sustainability, measured by EF and by ANS's natural capital component, is associated with reductions in SWB over the next decade followed by a rebound in SWB over the subsequent decade. We show also that the perfect substitutability assumptions on which ANS is calculated do not hold. Our findings highlight an important political challenge: governments that run sustainable policies may decrease the near-term wellbeing of citizens. This can reduce government's short-term popularity even though the improved sustainability may raise future wellbeing.

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 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.

This study analyzes a public-spending option from mining and oil resources and its impact on Niger's economy. The windfall gain from mining and oil revenues provides an opportunity for the country to reinvest natural resource rents, enhance economic development, and address infrastructure gaps. Drawing on the country's recent and expected mining and oil exploitation, we evaluate the effects of a reinvestment policy in road infrastructure using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. We find that investment in road infrastructure brings positive spillover effects to other sectors of the economy and benefits to the economy in the long run. Our analysis additionally shows that reinvestment in road infrastructure, given the initial state of infrastructure in Niger, could help mitigate the resource curse.

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.

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.

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.

Given the extensive discussion of China's air pollution and urban income inequality problems, relatively little attention has been paid to any relationship which may exist between the two. This paper seeks to do so, by exploring the existence of environmental equity in China. Specifically, we first calculate traditional measures of urban income inequality (the Gini coefficient and Theil's T and L indices) for the years 1995 and 2004. Then, we estimate ‘pollution-adjusted’ incomes using China-based health functions and economic valuation studies, and recalculate the income (or now welfare) inequality measures. The results indicate that as pollution cleanup efforts gain traction over time, the regressive consequences of pollution may diminish. We thus conclude with an encouraging note for developing countries: improving welfare distribution can coexist with an improving environment.

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.

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.

This study examines the economics of using crop residues to replace coal burning for energy in China in order to mitigate carbon emissions. About 60 per cent of the available crop residues are now used by rural households in China to replace coal so that the residues are already making a major contribution to controlling China's potential carbon emissions. Using the crop residues more efficiently in village or centralized facilities, shifting to crops with more residues, or growing energy crops can all further reduce carbon emissions. However, accounting for the costs of collecting, transporting, drying and storing crop residues and the foregone crop revenue, the study estimates that the marginal cost to remove more carbon emissions with crop residues will be high.

It is often argued that, ethically, resource rents should accrue to all citizens. Yet, in reality, the rents from exploiting national resources are often concentrated in the hands of a few. If resource rents were to be taxed, on the other hand, substantial amounts of public money could be raised and used to cover the population's infrastructure needs, such as access to electricity, water, sanitation, communication technology and roads, which all play important roles in a nation's economic development process. Here, the authors examine to what extent existing resource rents could be used to provide universal access to these infrastructures.

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.

The literature on volunteering has increased over the last few years. However, despite the importance of active environmental participation for solving public good and externality problems, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence regarding several interesting factors that influence this form of volunteering. This empirical study investigates the area by analyzing a cross-section of individuals from 38 countries using micro-data from wave III of the World Values Survey (1995–1997). The results suggest that individuals' active participation in environmental organizations is related not only to socioeconomic factors but also to political interest. We also find that a higher level of corruption is related to participation in environmental organizations. However, the situation is different for transition countries in which there was a collapse of institutional structures. The energy required to negotiate the ensuing chaos may have crowded out other forms of engagement.

Many conflicts in many parts of the developing world can be traced to disputes over land ownership, land use and land degradation. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that information asymmetries among various principals within these countries in land tenure and market systems have caused marginalization of some principals by the others. A sustained process of marginalization driven by these asymmetries has inevitably caused the disadvantaged to revolt resulting in many cases in violent clashes. In this paper, we develop a game theoretic model to test our hypothesis by analyzing the complex interdependencies existing among the various principals in the Narok District in Kenya. Violent clashes have been increasing in the district since the first outbreak in 1993. Preliminary results seem to confirm our hypothesis that asymmetrical information structures among the various principals over land and agricultural markets could have been the catalytic forces for these conflicts. In order to reduce these discrepancies, we recommend two institutional reforms. The first involves the adoption of a hybrid land tenure system whereby land ownership is based on individual titles while the use and sale of the land is governed by communal rules established by a community participatory proceeds. The second recommendation involves the formation of an information network comprising of all principals with the main objective of it being a forum for exchange of ideas and information pertaining to land use options and the opportunities offered by the market system.