Background to structural adjustment The oil price increases of the 1970s, the worldwide recession, and developing country debt crisis of the 1980s, led to the adoption of so-called structural adjustment policies (SAPs). These economic reform packages which included stringent monetary and fiscal measures, sought to restore conditions for growth and development by a combination of short-term ‘stabilization’ and more medium-term ‘adjustment’ policies for the macro-economy. SAPs have not always achieved their economic goals, for a variety of reasons. Of greater relevance is the fact that even where economic gains have been realized through structural adjustment, both environmental and social problems have persisted in several countries. The growing sustainable development literature is seeking to identify and remedy development strategies that lead to the unsustainable use of natural resources and the environment. One key question is whether the very economic policies being prescribed to alleviate economic problems are perhaps undermining the environmental resources and social fabric on which the long-term development of nations will ultimately depend.

This paper investigates the impact of structural adjustment policies on deforestation taking place when the agricultural frontier advances into forest reserves in Nicaragua. A computable general equilibrium model incorporating deforestation by squatters is used for policy simulations. The opportunity cost of migrating to the frontier does not simply depend on wage income opportunity, but also on market prices of basic grain which determine the capacity to consume beyond subsistence food-level given a certain real wage. Reducing public expenditures both conserves forests and enhances economic growth, while showing positive distributional effects. On the other hand, a strong conservation trend following a sales tax increase is driven by increasing poverty in rural areas. Noticeably, there are policies which initially intensify deforestation, but turn out to ease the pressure on forests over time. Rapid economic growth does not ensure less pressure on forest reserves.

This study addresses the role of multilateral development banks and their effectiveness in bringing environmental considerations, issues and consequences into structural and sectoral adjustment programmes in developing countries. It addresses a series of complex generic issues showing that such programmes cannot be meaningfully studied in isolation from other aid cooperation and government development programmes. The study proposes and discusses alternative explanations on how the multilateral development banks may have influenced thinking in borrowing countries. By looking more closely at the Philippines the study provides an insight into the dynamics and diversity of such programme lending and how its design can affect resource management and the environment in benign or adverse ways. It shows what complementary remedial action can be taken when institutional barriers, policy failures and market failures threaten the environment. It provides an analysis of how awareness of such interlinkages has emerged since 1980 and manifested itself in aid cooperation in general and in economy-wide adjustment lending in particular since 1987, while gradually being absorbed in governmental development plans and programmes with varying degrees of domestic ownership. In particular, we find that there seems to have been shifts in the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank's environmental policies after the publication of the Brundtland Commission Report in 1987.

Village economies and peasant households represent the main link between the economy and the environment in sub-Saharan Africa. The links from the macro level and down to the household level and further to the natural resource base are complex. It may therefore be difficult to predict the impact of macro policies and external shocks on the environment. This paper presents a typology of village economies and village economy-wide models. The framework is applied to a special case where a model is proposed and estimated to examine the impacts of external shocks, including structural adjustment policies, on cash-crop production and chitemene (shifting cultivation) in a remote Zambian village characterized by a missing (or negligible) labour market, input supply constraints, and credit rationing. Our findings indicate that structural adjustment policies, by decreasing the profitability of maize production, may encourage households to increase their chitemene production, resulting in more rapid deforestation.

The two papers presented here were commissioned by the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA). Established in 1993, EEPSEA supports training and research in environmental and resource economics. It uses a networking approach to provide financial and technical support to researchers in its ten member countries. The network meets in Singapore in May and November of each year. EEPSEA's current sponsors include Canada (IDRC & CIDA), Sweden (Sida), the MacArthur Foundation, and the Foreign Affairs Ministries of Denmark, Holland, and Norway.

The paper describes a number of developing country applications of economic instruments (EIs), focusing on how policy makers—mostly in Asia and La tin America—have addressed implementation problems. The informational and institutional demands of EIs can be as great as with regulations; in any event, the former are mostly used to complement not replace the latter. Consideration of political acc eptability has conditioned both instrument design (e.g. grandfathering of tradable permits, non-compliance fees rather than simple pollution charges) and phasing of implementation (e.g. starting with local experimentation, setting low initial charge rates). With the advance of market-oriented economic reforms in the developing world, the policy and institutional environment should become more conducive to applying EIs; with greater political openness in many countries, the scope for involving the media, n on-governmental organizations, and the public at large in environmental enforcement (e.g., through information disclosure programmes) should also increase.

This paper discusses how environmental considerations will affect tax policy in the decades ahead. It argues that, in the future, interactions between tax and environmental policy are likely to go well beyond recent discussion of double divided issues, and that internalization of environmental externalities via tax policy will be the goal, which inevitably will involve the particular rather than the general. As a result, notions of neutrality which dominate current thinking on tax design will come under challenge; and in ways which will go well beyond current discussion of special treatment for particular goods and industries on environmental grounds. special treatment of environmentally harmful methods of production, more so than of goods and industries as under present tax policies, will be the name of the game. Moreover, the informational requirements of such an approach to tax policy are likely to be large. The paper concludes by pointing out that if environmental quality is a luxury good, as many suppose, with income elasticity of demand greater than one, then high income households will gain disproportionately from internalization of the externalities at issue. This may fuel pressures for more redistribution elsewhere in the tax system than is currently the case.