The purpose of this paper is to review the applications of non-cooperative bargaining theory to water management problems. The interest in this subject stems from two considerations: (i) water resources continue to be mismanaged, despite their recognized importance for sustainable development, in particular in developing countries; (ii) negotiated decision making has the potential to improve water management, yet there is still little formal understanding of the forces driving bargaining processes, and applications of formal negotiation theory to water issues are also lacking. This paper surveys the existing non-cooperative bargaining models applied to water management problems, with the purpose of preliminarily assessing whether such a formal approach in the phase of problem exploration and policy formulation can support decision makers in the real world. It is the contention of this paper that the proposed approach may offer direct and indirect support by: shortening the time needed to reach an agreement through the (theoretical) identification of an ‘acceptability space’, and helping select policies which are self-enforcing and, therefore, acceptable.

Food-for-work (FFW) programs are commonly used both for short-term relief and long-term development purposes. This paper assesses the potential of FFW programs to reduce poverty and promote sustainable land use in the longer run. There is a danger that such programs distort labor allocation or crowd out private investments and therefore have unintended negative effects. We explore this issue using survey evidence from northern Ethiopia that we use to motivate a simple theoretical model, a more detailed version of which we then implement through an applied bio-economic model calibrated to northern Ethiopia. The analysis explores how FFW project outcomes may depend on FFW project design, market conditions, and technology characteristics. We show that FFW programs may either crowd out or crowd in private investments and highlight factors that condition whether FFW promotes or undercuts sustainable land use.

The modern study of stability in ecology can be said to have begun with the appearance of ‘Fluctuations of Animal Populations and a Measure of Community Stability’, by R.H. MacArthur in 1955. Since the publication of this influential paper, ecologists have investigated the properties of a number of different stability and stability-related concepts; the concepts of persistence, resilience, resistance, and variability readily come to mind. Of these various concepts, the concept of resilience itself appears to have been rather resilient. Indeed, as Neubert and Caswell (1997) and others have noted, today there is a vast literature on resilience. However, it is important to note that this literatur—to the best of my knowledge—has been primarily ecological in nature. In other words, the concept of resilience originated in ecology, and this concept has been applied and studied primarily in the context of ecosystems.

The paper analyzes the conflict between illegal and legal exploitation of wildlife species in an East African context. In the model there are two agents, an agency managing a national park of fixed area and a group of local people living in the vicinity of the park. The park agency has the legal right to exploit the wildlife, while the local people hunt illegally. Because of the property rights, the park agency has incentives to invest in the stock of wildlife, while the behaviour of the local people is steered by short-term considerations. The model is analyzed in two steps. Firstly, the market solution is studied. Next, the model is examined when user and property rights are given to the local people.

This paper analyzes the potential effects of climate change on Brazilian agriculture by considering irrigation as an adaptive strategy. Investigations were performed to determine how climatic variability influences irrigation and whether this adaptive measure actually reduces producers' vulnerability to climate change. We used a simultaneous equations model with endogenous switching to account for the heterogeneity in the decision of whether to use adaptive measures. We compared the expected land values under the actual and counterfactual cases of farm households that either adapt or do not adapt to climate change. Simulation results show that irrigation can be an effective tool for counteracting the harmful effects of climate change. The income of farmers tends to increase on lands where irrigation technologies are practiced. These conclusions confirm the need to invest in adaptation strategies to prepare Brazil for coping with the adverse effects of global climate change.

This paper aims to address the impact on deforestation of the use of forest products as safety nets by poor agricultural households. Two safety-net uses may be implemented: the diversification strategy and the coping strategy. With both strategies, crop risk reduction, lower risk aversion and larger population increase tropical deforestation. Forest profitability always tends to increase the forest cover in the diversification case. Conversely, considering the coping strategy, two opposite effects determine the impact of forest profitability on the forest cover: a portfolio effect and an insurance effect. Finally, the household is better off and deforests less when using the diversification strategy instead of the coping strategy.

A number of international conservation donors support efforts to encourage conservation indirectly by subsidizing commercial activities. Such plans beg two questions. First, if commercial ventures are expected to be profitable, why is external financing necessary for their initiation? Second, if commercial ventures are not expected to be profitable, could not greater incentives for conservation be generated by making direct payments? We examine these questions in detail. While we find that the practical impediments to instituting a direct payment programme may be substantial, the practical impediments to instituting any effective conservation programme may be substantial. On balance, there is a strong case to be made for greater experimentation with direct payment schemes than heretofore.

This paper uses a nested logit model to examine whether potential pollution abatement cost savings adjusted by institutional and socio-economic conditions influence the location choices of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) among Chinese provinces. It incorporates individual polluting firms’ characteristics instead of looking only at location attributes. The results show that (i) FDI firms in polluting industries tend to locate in provinces with higher potential abatement costs savings adjusted for local environmental regulation; (ii) relatively dirtier firms are more likely to locate in less developed provinces or provinces with fewer similar polluting industries; (iii) firms in pollution-intensive industries are more sensitive to regulation and development status than firms in non-polluting industries; and (iv) firms tend to locate in provinces where they have more bargaining power with local governments. These findings suggest the existence of domestic pollution havens in China.

This paper measures environmental efficiency (EE) and environmental productivity (EP) in 38 countries over the period 1971–92 and analyzes differences in these across countries. It explores several macro-economic factors that could explain these differences, such as income levels and the degree of openness in these countries. The average EE and EP indexes are found to be almost steady over the period 1971–92. In the annex-I countries, an increase in income levels initially leads to an increase in the average EE but subsequently to a decline in EE. In non-annex I countries, EE is increasing over the range of income in these countries. This study also finds an EKC type relationship between EP and per capita GDP in annex-I countries. The degree of openness has a significant positive impact on EE in annex-I countries.

We analyze the impact of land conservation policies on income distribution using a two-sector model. We find that conservation policies can have important distributional effects through changes in rents and wages. We show how aggregate rents rise when protected areas increase despite the reduction of land availability. Simultaneously, real wages decrease in consequence of higher agricultural prices. These distributional changes also affect the efficiency of conservation policies since higher rents lead to deforestation elsewhere. Results suggest that Pareto improving compensation should also be aimed at agricultural workers.

This paper applies recent advances in ecology to our understanding of firm development, sustainability, and economic development. The ecological literature indicates that the greater the functional richness of species in a system, the greater its resilience – that is, its ability to persist in the face of substantial changes in the environment. This paper focuses on the effects of functional richness across firm size on the ability of industries to survive in the face of economic change. Our results indicate that industries with a richness of industrial functions are more resilient to employment volatility.

This article addresses the causes of different regional performances of the forest sector in the process of Chinese rural reforms. After characterizing rural forestry reform processes in different regions, we estimate farmers' production responses to land tenure change and price liberalization, two major components of the reforms, and conduct a growth accounting. It is found that farmers' responses in different regions vary substantially, and the reform programmes can be important forces in determining either resource growth or stagnation. Our study suggests the critical importance of a stable policy environment in economic transition.

Concern about global climate change has elicited responses from governments around the world. These responses began with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and have continued with other negotiations, including the 2009 Copenhagen Summit. These negotiations raised important questions about whether countries will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, if so, how the burden of emissions reductions will be shared. To investigate these questions, we utilize environmental Kuznets curves for carbon emissions for the G8 plus five main developing countries. Our findings raise doubts about the feasibility of reducing global carbon emissions and shed light on the different positions taken by countries on the distribution of emissions reductions.

This paper provides a new explanation for the persistent land degradation in some parts of the world, despite the availability of seemingly effective soil conservation technologies. We demonstrate that soil conservation technologies may induce agricultural systems to exhibit equilibria characterized by both low and high levels of soil degradation. These two equilibria are separated by a threshold level of soil degradation beyond which a conservation investment will not yield a positive return. Once a parcel of land crosses this productivity threshold, soil degradation becomes economically irreversible (it is not profitable to invest in soil conservation) even though the degradation may be technically reversible. A case study of terracing investments in Peru is used to demonstrate the existence of multiple equilibria under conditions typical of many marginal agricultural areas. These findings help explain why attempts to encourage permanent adoption of soil conservation practices often fail, and how more successful policies could be designed.

This study is the first systematic attempt to test statistically the contrasting hypotheses on the emission of SO2 and CO2, and energy consumption in Japan and China for the last few decades. We postulate the hypotheses that local governments have incentives to internalize the local external diseconomies caused by SO2 emissions, but not the global external diseconomies caused by CO2 emissions. To substantiate our hypotheses, we decompose emissions of SO2 and CO2 into two factors: the emission factor (i.e. emission per energy use) and energy consumption. The results show that the prefectures where past energy consumption was high tend to reduce the emission factor of SO2 significantly in Japan, while we do not find such a tendency in China. There is also evidence that neither per capita income nor past energy consumption affects the CO2 emission factor and energy consumption significantly in both Japan and China, implying that an individual country has few incentives to reduce CO2 emissions.

The paper discusses valuation issues in the context of climate change impact estimation. Issues addressed are aggregation of damage costs over diverse regions (particularly equity-weighting), differentiation of per-unit values, willingness to pay versus willingness to accept compensation as a basis for valuation, and accountability for impacts. Numerical illustrations show that the damage cost estimates are quite sensitive to the assumptions made on these issues.

We study the effects of development and climate change on infectious diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa. Infant mortality and infectious disease are closely related, but there are better data for the former. In an international cross-section, per capita income, literacy, and absolute poverty significantly affect infant mortality. We use scenarios of these three determinants and of climate change to project the future incidence of malaria, assuming it to change proportionally to infant mortality. Malaria deaths will first increase, because of population growth and climate change, but then fall, because of development. This pattern is robust to the choice of scenario, parameters, and starting conditions; and it holds for diarrhoea, schistosomiasis, and dengue fever as well. However, the timing and level of the mortality peak is very sensitive to assumptions. Climate change is important in the medium term, but dominated in the long term by development. As climate can only be changed with a substantial delay, development is the preferred strategy to reduce infectious diseases even if they are exacerbated by climate change. Development can, in particular, support the needed strengthening of disease control programs in the short run and thereby increase the capacity to cope with projected increases in infectious diseases over the medium to long term. This conclusion must, however, be viewed with caution, because development, even of the sort envisioned in the underlying socio-economic scenarios, is by no means certain.

We use satellite remote sensing data of grassland cover in Inner Mongolia, China to test whether the existence of and the size of roads in 1995 is associated with the nature of the grassland in 2000 and/or if it affects the rate of change of the grassland between 1995 and 2000. The regression results show that the impact of roads on grassland cover depends on the nature of the resource. When the grassland is composed of relatively high quality grassland, roads lead to degradation, whereas when grassland resources are sparse, access to a road results in the restoration of the resource.

This study explores the effects of land tenure institutions on land use and management using household date from cocoa growing areas of Ghana. Various land tenure institutions with different land rights coexist in our sites, such as allocated family land, inherited land, appropriated village land, and land received as gift. While tree planting and the decision to leave land fallow may be affected by land tenure status, there are no significant differences in labor allocation and revenue of both cocoa and food crops among parcels under different land tenure institutions. These results support the hypothesis that management incentives of cocoa fields, but not food crop fields, tend to be equalized due to the incentive-enhancing effects of granting secure land rights after efforts to plant cocoa trees are expended.

We solve directly a general maximin (sustainment, intergenerational-equity) problem. Because the shadow values of a maximin problem do not correspond to the shadow values from a general discounted-utility solution, they correspond to the prices of only a very special competitive economy. Virtual discount factors for the economy arise. They do not correspond to hyperbolic discount factors. Hartwick's rule is derived and generalized naturally to take into account non-autonomous and non-deterministic features of the economy. Under uncertainty, Hartwick's rule is the analytic expression of a form of precautionary principle. Hotelling's rule is a necessary condition, but may be more complex than has been appreciated in simple models. Some interpretations of strong sustainment are special cases of weak sustainment but, paradoxically, may be more difficult to solve.