Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T05:04:08.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Measuring the welfare effects of forests: an application of the travel cost model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2019

Martha Rogers*
Affiliation:
The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

In this paper, a travel cost model was applied to the case of firewood collection to assess how the inclusion of household fixed effects and how assumptions regarding conditions in the local labor market impacted resulting welfare estimates. To assess these impacts, a unique household panel data set from Kagera, Tanzania was used. It was estimated that, under the assumption of constrained labor markets, households in the Kagera region of Tanzania are willing-to-pay, on average, $120 per year (2016 USD) for access to local forests. These estimated figures were nearly 50 per cent higher when household fixed effects were excluded and nearly 10 per cent higher under the assumption of perfect labor markets. In addition, these results support previous research showing that, in many developing countries, households' demand for firewood is inelastic and that households would be willing to spend a significant amount of their resources on forest access.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ainsworth, M (2004) User's guide to the Kagera health and development survey datasets. Tech. rep., Development Research Group, The World Bank, Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
Amacher, GS, Hyde, WF and Joshee, BR (1993) Joint production and consumption in traditional households: fuelwood and crop residues in two districts in Nepal. Journal of Development Studies 30, 206225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amacher, GS, Ersado, L, Grebner, DL and Hyde, WF (2004) Disease, microdams, and natural resources in Tigray, Ethiopia: impacts on productivity and labour supplies. Journal of Development Studies 40, 122145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Angelsen, A, Jagger, P, Babigumira, R, Belcher, B, Hogarth, NJ, Bauch, S, Borner, J, Smith-Hall, C and Wunder, S (2014) Environmental income and rural livelihoods: a global-comparative analysis. World Development 64, S12S28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baland, J, Bardhan, P, Das, S, Mookherjee, D and Sarkar, R (2010) The environmental impact of poverty: evidence from firewood collection in Rural Nepal. Economic Development and Cultural Change 59, 2361.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bellassen, V and Luyssaert, S (2014) Carbon sequestration: managing forests in uncertain times. Nature 506, 153155.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bockstael, NE, Strand, IE and Hanemann, WM (1987) Time and the recreational demand model. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 69, 293302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bockstael, NE, Strand, IE, McConnell, KE and Arsanjani, F (1990) Sample selection bias in the estimation of recreation demand functions: an application to sportfishing. Land Economics 66, 4049.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, AC and Trivedi, PK (1986) Econometric models based on count data: comparisons and applications of some estimators and tests. Journal of Applied Econometrics 1, 2953.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, AC and Trivedi, PK (1998) Regression analysis of count data. No. 30 in Econometric Society Monographs, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, AC and Trivedi, PK (2005) Microeconometrics: Methods and Applications. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, L, Heerink, N and Van Den Berg, M (2006) Rural China: a household model for three villages in Jiangxi Province. Ecological Economics 58, 407420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooke, P (1998) Intrahousehold labor allocation responses to environmental good scarcity: a case study from the hills of Nepal. Economic Development and Cultural Change 46, 807830.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooke, P, Köhlin, G and Hyde, W (2008) Fuelwood, forests and community management-evidence from household studies. Environment and Development Economics 13, 103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooke, P, et al. (2000) Changes in intrahousehold labor allocation to environmental goods collection: a case study from Rural Nepal, 1982 and 1997. Food Consumption and Nutrition Division Discussion Paper Series 87, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
Creel, MD and Loomis, JB (1991) Confidence intervals for welfare measures with application to a problem of truncated counts. The Review of Economics and Statistics 73, 370373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deaton, A (1997) The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconomic Approach to Development Policy. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dewees, PA (1989) The woodfuel crisis reconsidered: observations on the dynamics of abundance and scarcity. World Development 17, 11591172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferraro, PJ, Lawlor, K, Mullan, KL and Pattanayak, SK (2012) Forest figures: ecosystem services valuation and policy evaluation in developing countries. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 6, 2044.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2017a) FAOSTAT Statistical Database. Rome, Italy. Available at http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data.Google Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2017b) Forests and Energy. Available at http://www.fao.org/3/i6928en/I6928EN.pdf.Google Scholar
Grimard, F (1997) Household consumption smoothing through ethnic ties: evidence from Cote d'Ivoire. Journal of Development Economics 53, 391422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gundimeda, H and Kohlin, G (2008) Fuel demand elasticities for energy and environmental policies: Indian sample survey evidence. Energy Economics 30, 517546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gupta, G and Köhlin, G (2006) Preferences for domestic fuel: analysis with socio-economic factors and rankings in Kolkata, India. Ecological Economics 57, 107121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guta, DD (2014) Effect of fuelwood scarcity and socio-economic factors on household bio-based energy use and energy substition in Rural Ethiopia. Energy Policy 75, 217227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haab, TC and McConnell, KE (2002) Valuing Environmental and Natural Resources: The Econometrics of Non-Market Valuation. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heltberg, R, Arndt, T and Sekhar, N (2000) Fuelwood consumption and forest degradation: a household model for domestic energy substitution in Rural India. Land Economics 76, 213232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hicks, JR (1946) Value and Capital: An Inquiry Into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory, vol. 2. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hyde, W, Kohlin, G and Amacher, G (2000) Social forestry reconsidered. Silva Fennica 34, 285314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacoby, H (1993) Shadow wages and peasant family labour supply: an econometric application to the Peruvian Sierra. The Review of Economic Studies 60, 903921.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayachandran, S, de Laat, J, Lambin, EF, Stanton, CY, Audy, R and Thomas, NE (2017) Cash for carbon: a randomized trial of payment for ecosystem services to reduce deforestation. Science 357, 267273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Le, KT (2010) Separation hypothesis tests in the agricultural household model. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 92, 14201431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewbel, A (1996) Aggregation without separability: a generalized composite commodity theorem. The American Economic Review 86, 524543.Google Scholar
Murphy, DMA, Berazneva, J and Lee, DR (2018) Fuelwood source substitution, gender, and shadow prices in Western Kenya. Environment and Development Economics 23, 655678.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Outes-Leon, I and Dercon, S (2008) Survey attrition and attrition bias in young lives. Young Lives Technical Note 5.Google Scholar
Palmer, C and MacGregor, J (2009) Fuelwood scarcity, energy substitution, and rural livelihoods in Namibia. Environment and Development Economics 14, 693715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pattanayak, S, Sills, E and Kramer, R, et al. (2004) Seeing the forest for the fuel. Environment and Development Economics 9, 155179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitt, MM (1985) Equity, externalities, and energy subsidies: the case of Kerosense in Indonesia. Journal of Development Economics 17, 201217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberger, R (2016) Recreational use value database. Oregon State University, College of Forestry. Available at http://recvaluation.forestry.oregonstate.edu.Google Scholar
Salzman, J, Bennet, G, Carroll, N, Goldstein, A and Jenkins, M (2018) The global status and trends of payments for ecosystem services. Nature Sustainability 1, 136144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, AK (1966) Peasant and dualism with or without surplus labor. Journal of Political Economy 74, 425450.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The World Bank (1991–1994) Tanzania - Kagera Health and Development Survey 1991–1994 (Wave 1 to 4 Panel). World Bank and University of Dar es Salaam. Available at http://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/359.Google Scholar
Willig, RD (1976) Consumer's surplus without apology. The American Economic Review 66, 589597.Google Scholar
World Bank Institute (2011) Estimating the opportunity costs of REDD+. Trianing Manual by Douglas White and Peter Minang.Google Scholar
Yen, ST and Adamowicz, WL (1993) Statistical properties of welfare measures from count-data models of recreation demand. Review of Agricultural Economics 15, 203215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Rogers supplementary material

Rogers supplementary material

Download Rogers supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 1.8 MB