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.

Tourists, protected area managers, gateway communities, and national or international interested parties may have different objectives for protected areas management in developing countries. When values and incentives are at cross-purposes, difficulties in management may persist, but policy alternatives may be available. This research hopes to better understand the incentives facing different groups of stakeholders in the ecological-economic management of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacan, Mexico. The quasi-private management of this protected area by ‘ejidatarios’ provides an additional feature of interest. Travel cost, contingent behavior and export base analyses are used to establish alternative optimal entrance price strategies at the Reserve. Potential policy alternatives from the perspective of each stakeholder group are explored. Significant changes in management strategy, optimal entry fee and economic benefit appear to be possible by recognizing different scales and orientations of relevant stakeholders.

The economy of Mongolia, a country rich in natural resources, is increasingly dependent upon the mining sector. International prices of mining commodities have been highly volatile in recent years. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to examine the short-term effects on the Mongolian economy of two scenarios: (1) a moderate boom in the coal market; and (2) a drop in the world price of metal ores. It is found that the Dutch disease effect generated by the shocks is insignificant given the structure of the economy (e.g., small export shares and low export intensity of manufacturing and agriculture commodities) and a labor market condition with high unemployment. Since the economy is largely dependent upon on the mining sector, the impacts of the shocks are jarring, implying that the government must abide by its fiscal rules for stable growth and prosperity.

Lead acid batteries generate hazardous lead waste with environmental and health implications. The deposit refund system for recycling in Delhi provides a discount to consumers on purchasing new batteries and returning used batteries to retailers for recycling. The retailers determine whether batteries are recycled in an environmentally friendly or unfriendly manner by selling them to manufacturers or to unorganized scrap dealers who then sell to unregistered smelters. This study finds that the economic instrument that brings used batteries into recycling works well. Organized recycling is limited, since retailers prefer selling used batteries to the informal sector because of higher prices, lower storage costs and taxes. In addition, we consider policy instruments like a green tax on batteries with a refund when the manufacturer ensures environment-friendly recycling and fiscal incentives to organized smelters to increase production.

This paper estimates the cost of a policy to restrict water trades to mining firms in northern Chile in order to protect riparian ecosystems and indigenous agriculture. In response to the policy, mining firms have developed high-cost desalination and pumping facilities to secure adequate water supplies. We develop a methodology and estimate the cost of market transactions that fail to occur due to the policy. Lost trade surplus is estimated at US$52 million per year. Without trade restrictions, around 86 per cent of the remaining agricultural water in the region would be transferred to mining.

This paper examines efficiency and equity in groundwater markets with special attention to output sharing contracts and to the bargaining relationships between sellers and buyers, using household level data from Madhya Pradesh, India. Regression results find no significant inefficiency on farms managed by output sharing buyers, presumably because optimal input intensities are achieved through effective monitoring and contract adherence mechanisms embedded in long-term and intensive personal relationships between sellers and buyers. As for equity, the finding is that, while output sharing buyers pay higher water prices, the rate of premiums is merely 5 percentage points higher than the informal interest rate that they would have had to carry under other types of groundwater contracts. The results also show that buyers who have access to alternative water sellers pay lower water prices. These findings indicate that if the imperfection of credit and contingent markets in rural areas are taken into account, informal groundwater markets work fairly well in agrarian communities if monitoring and contract adherence mechanisms are embedded and a sufficient number of potential sellers are available.

We combined field experiment and household survey data to investigate whether working in a risky occupation such as fishing makes fishers less risk averse than people in other occupations. The unique characteristic of Vietnam's fisheries enables us to solve the endogeneity problem of occupational choice usually found in this kind of study. We used prospect theory as the main analytical framework and developed a practical procedure to simultaneously estimate the parameters of the utility function under prospect theory. The key finding is that working in a fishery makes economic agents less risk averse than others.

Deforestation is one of the major sources of carbon emissions, but the Kyoto Protocol presently excludes avoiding these emissions to fulfill stabilization targets. Since the need for policy incentives for the reduction of emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) was officially recognized in 2007, the focus of this debate has shifted to issues of implementation. Concerns about the effects that the availability of low-cost REDD credits might have on energy investments, and the development of clean technology constitute the main motivation of this paper. We analyze the production side of the problem with the help of a real options model with an option to invest in less carbon-intensive energy technology and an option to purchase credits on REDD, which will (or will not) be exercised in the future. Unresolved questions can thus still be addressed later, while producers and investors hold REDD options to maintain flexibility for later decisions.

Coal has fueled China's rapid growth in recent decades, but it also severely pollutes the air and causes many health issues. The magnitude of the health damage caused by air pollution depends on the location of emission sources. In this paper, we look into the spatial distribution of coal-fired power plants, which are the major emission sources in China, and investigate the determining factors behind the distribution. We find that the driving factors are economic development and expansion of electricity grid coverage; the latter factor plays a key role in provinces that are less developed but have abundant coal resources. This suggests a way to reduce health damages caused by air pollution without harming the economy: attracting coal-fired plants to less populated areas by developing trans-province electricity trade and grid coverage.

‘Agroindustrialization’ comprises three related sets of changes: 1 growth of commercial, off-farm agro-processing, distribution, and input provision activities; 2 institutional and organizational change in the relations between farms and firms both upstream and downstream, such as a marked increased in vertical integration and contract-based procurement; and 3 related changes in product composition, technologies, and sectoral and market structure (Reardon and Barrett, 2000). The actual and potential environmental effect of these changes have been sparsely documented to date. There does not seem to have been any attempt at a reasonably general analysis of the pathways by which such effects might occur or of the instruments governments might have at their disposal to influence these pathways. This essay is meant to fill the latter gap while the articles and policy forum that follow provide more detailed findings and perspectives on constituent issues.

The authors study the impact of natural resource degradation on income diversification in Beninese fishing communities. Using survey data and econometric analysis, they show that fishermen are more likely to diversify their income when the degradation of the fish stock is more severe. However, the level of income diversification that they find is surprisingly low and far from sufficient to relieve the stress on the lakes. The latter relates to low levels of formal education among fishermen and the unregulated use of highly productive, but damaging, fishing gear. These two factors result in a high return to fishing relative to non-fishing activities, even amid degradation.

As an international metropolitan area undergoing rapid development, Beijing is facing a sharp rise in the volume of motor vehicles and mobility, which has become the major contributor to the air pollution in this city. This is evident in the recent ranking of Beijing as the most congested as well as the most polluted city in the world by the Millennium Cities Database. Local government has adopted a battery of policies to reduce these problems. In this study, we investigate the impact of increasing the fuel tax on travel mode choice based on a large sample of travel survey data. We estimate that if the price of gasoline increased to a moderate level, 11.53 RMB/liter, the total car volume on the road would be reduced by 7 per cent, which corresponds to a reduction in CO2 emissions of 786,002.4 tons, or about 8 per cent of vehicular emissions from private cars and company-owned cars in Beijing.

This study estimates Indonesian households’ carbon emissions that are attributed to their expenditures in 2005 and 2009 to analyze the pattern, distribution and drivers of their carbon footprint. Employing an input-output-emission-expenditure framework, the authors find a significant difference in household carbon emissions between different affluence levels, regions and educational levels. They also find that, while many household characteristics influence emissions, total expenditure is by far the most important determinant of household emissions, both across households and over time. Consequently, emissions inequality is very similar to expenditure inequality across households. The decomposition analysis confirms that changes in emissions are predominantly due to rising expenditures between the two periods, while expenditure elasticities analysis suggests that the rise in household emissions is mainly caused by the overall rise in total household expenditure, and not by shifting consumption shares among consumption categories. The paper discusses policy options for Indonesia to reduce this very strong expenditure–emissions link.

The neoclassical economic growth model and its extensions in the fields of environmental economics and endogenous growth theory typically represent welfare as a single argument function of consumption when the models are analytically solved. This simplified welfare specification is narrower than those described in the quality-of-life literature and emphasized by proponents of sustainable development. The purpose of this paper is to analytically solve for the properties of a growth model based on a broader quality-of-life measure. The welfare measure includes two arguments, consumption and the stock of nature capital. This formulation enables an analysis of the consequences of the dynamic tension between conventionally defined economic growth and nature capital preservation. We find that a static model without technical progress yields diverse steady states, stability properties, and comparative statics, while a model with exogenous technical progress exhibits unusual comparative dynamics and balanced growth paths. These unusual outcomes have a number of policy-relevant implications for sustainable development.

This paper investigates the potential for economic policies to influence environmental outcomes in low-income agriculture. The analysis focuses on how changes in agricultural prices influence land-use decisions and environmental indicators. Tree-planting decisions of low-income farmers in the Philippines are examined using a stochastic dynamic household model. Empirical analysis and dynamic simulations demonstrate that changes in relative prices and relative price risks are important determinants of tree-planting decisions. Results show that small holders are sensitive to risks associated with tree crops, but that price risk is not an insurmountable barrier to tree crop adoption. The relationship between cropping patterns and two environmental indicators - erosion and species diversity - are discussed.

This special issue focuses on the poor and their role in forest degradation. The idea that the poor are both agents of forest degradation and victims of forest loss is not new. Neither is the observation that unsustainable rates of forest use by smallholder farmers arises as a result of a complex interplay of incentives, constraints, and institutional forces. For researchers and policy makers concerned with natural resource use in low-income settings, theory is often useful, but rarely adequate to explain behavioural patterns. Unambiguous theoretical findings tend to flow only from substantial sets of simplifying assumptions, and such assumptions, measured against the observed facts of smallholder agriculture, seem largely untenable. Unfortunately much empirical research on the topic suffers from an opposite problem. In settings where, at any point in time, everything matters and nothing is held constant, econometric findings are frequently weak. The combination of heterogeneity of circumstance, homogeneity of market signals, and limitations on smallholder response generally overwhelms the statistical power of small data sets, often collected with different purposes in mind.

Village economies and peasant households represent the main link between the economy and the environment in sub-Saharan Africa. The links from the macro level and down to the household level and further to the natural resource base are complex. It may therefore be difficult to predict the impact of macro policies and external shocks on the environment. This paper presents a typology of village economies and village economy-wide models. The framework is applied to a special case where a model is proposed and estimated to examine the impacts of external shocks, including structural adjustment policies, on cash-crop production and chitemene (shifting cultivation) in a remote Zambian village characterized by a missing (or negligible) labour market, input supply constraints, and credit rationing. Our findings indicate that structural adjustment policies, by decreasing the profitability of maize production, may encourage households to increase their chitemene production, resulting in more rapid deforestation.

Solid fuel burning in households is a leading health risk for people in developing countries. Several studies of indoor air pollution from solid fuels have analyzed the problem at the village and household level, but to design effective policies it is important to understand the large-scale socioeconomic drivers of household air pollution (HAP). Using county-level data covering all of China, we examine relationships between socioeconomic variables and ambient concentrations of PM and SO2 resulting from household energy use. Applying both non-parametric and parametric techniques, we find that income and education are robust determinants of HAP; structural characteristics affect the HAP turning points; and the poorest counties bear a disproportionate amount of total pollution, especially urban counties and counties located in the coastal provinces.

To foster the adoption of sustainable intensification practices amongst Ghana's farmers, they are widely promoted through training sessions provided by development organizations, companies, and the public extension service. We investigate whether these training sessions are effective and find that they are effective only for the diffusion of organic fertilizers but not for mulching. We suggest that this comes from the complexity of the innovations. Mulching is one of the simplest sustainable intensification technologies. It diffuses easily through peer learning and, after an initial training delivered to a critical mass of farmers, does not require training anymore. The use of organic fertilizers, in contrast, requires more specific knowledge and adaptation, which limits the effectiveness of peer learning and increases the effectiveness of training. This suggests that to achieve a widespread diffusion of sustainable intensification amongst Ghana's farmers, training sessions should focus on those practices that are complex and thus difficult to learn from peers.