The main objective of the paper is to estimate the costs of groundwater over exploitation and examine the costs and benefits from groundwater replenishing mechanisms in different ecological contexts. Using the public good and externalities framework, the study shows how groundwater exploitation in Andhra Pradesh, India is resulting in economic losses to individual farmers apart from ecological degradation. It is argued that policies towards strengthening the resource base (replenishment mechanisms) and equitable distribution of the resource (property rights) would be beneficial, economically as well as ecologically.

The analysis is in favour of investment in replenishment mechanisms such as irrigation tanks and percolation tanks. The situation of over extraction and the resultant environmental degradation is a consequence of lack of appropriate and adequate policies (policy failure) for managing the subsurface water resources. Hitherto, groundwater policies (subsidized credit, power, etc.) are in the nature of encouraging private initiatives in groundwater development. It is argued that community-based investments in replenishment as well as extraction of groundwater would make better economic as well as ecological sense.

In the mid-hills of Nepal, as in many developing countries, gradually developing urban centers and increasing demand for agricultural produce, due to population growth and early development activities, have persuaded farm households to reorient their subsistence farming to become farm systems growing surplus food to be sold in the markets. To cope with these changes, institutions play an important role and, for these institutions to be effective, farmers must perceive their participation as not being coerced. Their participation is influenced by individual household characteristics and proximity to support services and markets. Our main findings from the analysis of household surveys based on the level of market participation included: (1) the education level and amount of training attended by family members are influencing social variables, while farm size and gross farm income are dominant economic variables influencing household participation and perceived institutional effectiveness; (2) these variations revealed significant differences in the levels of market economy for household participation and institutional effectiveness within the watershed; and (3) the factor analysis further categorized several socioeconomic variables into three major factors explaining household participation and institutional effectiveness; these included labor quality and resources, supplementary income coming from migration and off-farm activities, and awareness and modern skills acquired by farm household members living within the watershed.

A dynamic model of selective harvesting in multi-species, multi-age tropical forests is developed. Forests are predicted to exhibit different optimal harvesting profiles depending on the nature of their joint cost functions and own or cross-species stock effects. The model is applied to the controversy about incentives produced by various taxes. The impacts of specific taxes are shown to depend on the composition of the forest stocks, growth rates, and joint cost effects. Therefore, specific taxes may create different incentives and impacts in Indonesia than in Brazil or Malaysia, for example, suggesting that no single uniform forest tax policy will be appropriate for all countries or all forests.

The effects of deforestation in Cameroon such as the erosion of agricultural lands, drying up water bodies during dry seasons, desertification, disappearance of plant and animal species, modifications of both local and regional climatic conditions and global warming through its effect on the global carbon cycle are likely to affect agricultural activities and economic growth. This paper investigates the immediate causes and consequences of deforestation in Cameroon between 1970 and 2000. Quantitative estimates show that coffee, and cocoa producer prices, food crop prices, and the timber export price index, on the one hand, and the oil boom, the structural adjustment policies, and the devaluation of the CFA franc, on the other hand, are quite important in stimulating the clearing of forests. Equally, the agricultural value added per hectare increases the profitability of maintaining forests. The implication of these results is that the importance of non-forest policies is underappreciated in Cameroon.