Identifying a demand function for air quality is a key input to calculate welfare measurements of pollution abatement policies. We defined intra-urban housing submarkets to apply a Second Stage hedonic pricing model that allowed us to identify an inverse demand function for PM10 reductions in Bogotá. The monthly benefits of compliance with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard (50 μg/m3 – annual average), and the far more stringent World Health Organization standard (20 μg/m3 – annual average) are valued at US$12.16 and US$189.64 per household, respectively. These values, in turn, represent about 1.35 per cent and 21.04 per cent of the average household income. The hedonic model applied hereby shows that intra-urban housing submarkets are suitable for the identification of a demand function to be used by policy makers interested in evaluating non-marginal benefits (costs) from air quality improvements (deterioration).

Understanding the extent to which agriculture can adapt to climate change and the determinants of farmers' adaptive capacity are of paramount importance from a policy perspective. Based on household survey data from a large sample in rural China, the present article adopts a panel approach to estimate the potential benefits of long-run adaptation and to identify the determinants of farmers' adaptive capacity. The empirical results suggest that, for various model settings and climate change scenarios, long-run adaptations should mitigate one-third to one-half of the damages of warming on crop profits by the end of this century. These findings support the basic argument of the hedonic approach that omitting long-run adaptations will dramatically overestimate the potential damage of climate change. The paper also finds that household-level capital intensity and farmland size have significant effects on farmers' adaptive capacities.

This study examines the relationship between groundwater irrigation and off-farm employment with a set of household level data collected in North China. The results provide evidence that off-farm employment reduces both time spent on irrigation in terms of total hours of irrigation and the amount of groundwater pumped. However, these effects have not resulted in losses of crop production. In fact, water productivity measured as output value produced per m3 of groundwater pumped is higher among households with off-farm employment. These seemingly contradictory findings are explained by the increased use of water-saving technologies such as furrow irrigation, underground pipes and/or lined canals. These technologies reduce seepage losses during the conveyance of groundwater as well as during irrigation of the fields. As a result, less groundwater needs to be pumped to achieve the same level of groundwater irrigation application rate in the field.

A discrete choice experiment, aiming to elicit public preferences for improvements in solid waste services, is carefully administered across socioeconomic zones in the city of Hawassa, Ethiopia. Observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity are analyzed using mixed logit choice models. The results show that there exists substantial willingness to pay to increase collection frequency and separate recyclable waste. A new issue is the focus on child labor in the waste management sector. Significant gender effects are found: women are more interested than men in increasing waste collection frequency and value the abolishment of child labor more highly, as do higher income households. As expected, respondents living in wealthier neighborhoods are more likely to pay higher service charges. Education indirectly influences preferences for waste separation. The study provides important insight into the social benefits of public investment decisions to improve the quality of solid waste management services in large cities in Ethiopia.

Most developing countries are increasingly depending on freshwater based aquaculture to supplement the declining catch from capture fisheries. Yet the competition between capture fisheries and cage culture for space, pollution generated by cage culture, and fish markets interaction effects are hardly conceptualized in a bioeconomic framework. Furthermore, the economic viability of cage culture depends on substantial investment thresholds, engendering foreign direct investment in the industry in developing countries. This paper develops a conceptual model for fresh-water-based aquaculture that accounts for these effects. We found that a Pigouvian tax (optimum ad valorem tax) that corrects the externalities depends on economic and biological parameters in both fisheries. Correcting for the externalities results in a reduction in aquaculture production but not optimum wild catch. Furthermore, with foreign capital in aquaculture, the Pigouvian tax equals the ratio of net to total benefit from aquaculture. Numerical values are used to illustrate the results.