Suchergebnisse

I wandered into environment and development economics through an initially disconnected series of interests in the environment, development and, finally, economics. Family camping trips instilled in me a love of nature from an early age, but growing up in the US industrial heartland in the 1960s also exposed me (literally) to serious pollution problems. My home state of Ohio is famous for having a river that caught on fire. It is also on the shores of Lake Erie, which was the source of my family's Friday fish dinners untilmercury contamination closed the fishery. About the only business in my rural hometown was a waste dump, which contaminated all the wells in the town and forced the town to develop a more costly water source.

A decade has passed since Wasting Assets, a study of Indonesia by Robert
Repetto and colleagues at the World Resources Institute, drew widespread
attention to the potential divergence between gross and net measures of
national income. This was by no means the first 'green accounting' study.
Martin Weitzman, John Hartwick, and Partha Dasgupta and Geoffrey
Heal had all conducted seminal theoretical work in the 1970s. But the
World Resources Institute study demonstrated that data were adequate
even in a developing country to estimate adjustments for the depletion of
some important forms of natural capital and that the adjustments could
be large relative to conventional, gross measures of national product and
investment. The adjusted, net measures suggested that a substantial
portion of Indonesia's rapid economic growth during the 1970s and
1980s was simply the unsustainable 'cashing in' of the country's natural
wealth.

Previous studies of the association between pollution and income have tended to analyse cross-sectional or panel data for a sample of developing and developed countries. This paper presents an analysis for a single country, Malaysia. This south-east Asian country has more, and probably better, data on environmental quality than perhaps any other developing country. I find that pollution–income relationships from the cross-country studies fail to predict accurately trends in air and water pollution in Malaysia. In particular, none of six pollution-income relationships estimated using a panel data set for Malaysian states has the hypothesized 'environmental Kuznets curve' form. Although these results are inconsistent with the predictions of the cross-country relationships, they make sense in the Malaysian context. Perhaps most important, their interpretation confirms the importance of policy decisions in determining environmental outcomes.

Countries richly endowed with natural resources have, on average, developed less rapidly than countries that are poor in natural resources. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the level of investment in reproducible capital has been insufficient to offset the depletion of natural capital. The empirical significance of this explanation can be investigated by analysing modified measures of net investment and net domestic product. Estimation of these measures involves calculating the economic depreciation of natural resources, a task that has been problematic in previous studies. Malaysia provides an ideal case for such empirical investigations, as it is one of the world's most resource-rich countries yet also has one of the world's fastest-growing economies, consists of three subnational regions that differ significantly in terms of economic structure, and has sufficient data for estimating conceptually correct measures of natural resource depreciation. Results of the analysis indicate that Malaysia has developed sustainably, despite substantial resource depletion. This is not the case in two of the regions, however, where trends in both net investment and net domestic product indicate that current consumption levels cannot be sustained. Nevertheless, the regional differences in sustainability might be consistent with optimal national use of the rents generated by exploitation of the country's natural resources.

Protection against coastal disasters has been identified as an important service of mangrove ecosystems. Empirical studies on this service have been criticized, however, for using small samples and inadequately controlling for confounding factors. We used data on several hundred villages to test the impact of mangroves on human deaths during a 1999 super cyclone that struck Orissa, India. We found that villages with wider mangroves between them and the coast experienced significantly fewer deaths than ones with narrower or no mangroves. This finding was robust to the inclusion of a wide range of other variables to our statistical model, including controls for the historical extent of mangroves. Although mangroves evidently saved fewer lives than an early warning issued by the government, the retention of remaining mangroves in Orissa is economically justified even without considering the many benefits they provide to human society besides storm-protection services.

Area fees have become an increasingly important component of forest revenue systems in tropical developing countries. They are commonly viewed as having a neutral impact on decisions by timber concessionaires. This view is incorrect. Using both theoretical and empirical models, we demonstrate that area fees can induce concessionaires to accelerate timber harvests and to harvest more selectively. In Cameroon, area fees at recent levels create an incentive for concessionaires to harvest forests in half the estimated sustained-yield period. Countries that wish to encourage concessionaires to comply with sustained-yield requirements must implement measures that counter the depletion-accelerating effects of area fees.

Environmental regulations can affect productivity in various ways: diverting inputs to the so-called non-productive uses or originating less efficient production processes. Adequate environmental regulations should generate benefits that exceed their costs although not all benefits can be translated into the increase of the product. ; Las regulaciones en materia ambiental pueden afectar la productividad de diversas maneras: desviando insumos a los denominados usos no productivos u originando procesos de producción menos eficientes. Las regulaciones ambientales adecuadas deberían generar beneficios que superen sus costos a pesar de que no todos los beneficios se pueden traducir en el incremento del producto.

Many of the frontiers of environmental economics research are at the interface of large-scale and long-term environmental change with national and global economic systems. This is also where some of the most of challenging environmental policy issues occur. Volume 3 of the Handbook of Environmental Economics provides a synthesis of the latest theory on economywide and international environmental issues and a critical review of models for analyzing those issues. It begins with chapters on the fundamental relationships that connect environmental resources to economic growth and long-run social welfare. The following chapters consider how environmental policy differs in a general-equiIibrium setting from a partial-equilibrium setting and in a distorted economy from a perfect economy. The volume closes with chapters on environmental issues that cross or transcend national borders, such as trade and the environment, biodiversity conservation, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global climate change. The volume provides a useful reference for not only natural resource and environmental economists but also international economists, development economists, and macroeconomists