Suchergebnisse

AbstractFunding for PES occurs through a variety of public and private sources. Potential difficulties associated with providing emergency psychiatric care in a free‐market economy are discussed.

ABSTRACTTraditional pastoralist land management institutions in sub-Saharan Africa have been stressed by an increasing human population and related forces, including private enclosure of grazing land; government-sponsored privatization; and the increasing prevalence of violent conflicts and livestock theft. We model the incompleteness and flexibility of traditional grazing rights using fuzzy set theory. We compare individual and social welfare under the traditional system to individual and social welfare under a private property system and a common property system. Whether the traditional system is preferred to private property depends on whether the value of mobility, as defined by the traditional system, is more valuable than the right of exclusion inherent in private property. We find that under some conditions the imprecision which characterizes traditional rights can result in higher social returns than a common property regime characterized by complete symmetric rights across all members of the user group and complete exclusion of non-members.

In many regions of the world, property rights to natural resources are held under various forms of communal ownership, which often exhibit flexibility for users to access different resources depending on relative need. This paper explores the links between climate variability, transactions costs associated with resource access, and patterns of herd mobility in northern Kenya. Results indicate that greater spatial variability of vegetation leads to greater herd mobility, and that higher transaction costs reduce mobility for herds engaged in long-distance movements. Moreover, long-distance mobility is higher in drought years only in those communities with greater spatial and seasonal variability of vegetation.

ABSTRACTSince modification of agricultural production choices in developing countries often provides positive environmental externalities to people in developed countries, payment for environmental services (PES) has become an important topic in the context of economic development and poverty reduction. We consider two broad categories of PES programs, land-diversion programs, where lands are diverted from agriculture to other uses, and working-land programs, where agricultural production activities are modified to achieve environmental objectives. PES programs are generally good for landowners. The distribution of land and land quality is critical in determining poverty impacts. Where ES and agricultural productivity are negatively correlated and the poor own lands of low agricultural quality, they stand to gain from PES programs. Consumers and wage laborers may lose where food supply is inelastic and programs reduce labor demand. Working-land programs may have better distributional effects than diversion programs.