We examine the implications of migration and insecure property rights to land use and deforestation in tropical frontier forests. Three forms of property rights risks are introduced to basic land-use forms. Illegal logging risk is associated with forest plantations, a land expropriation risk affects land in agriculture and plantation forestry, and illegal logging risks threaten native forest land. Public and private landowners can reduce these risks by employing costly enforcement effort. We show how that migration, expropriation, and illegal logging risks lead to deforestation by promoting agricultural expansion, and illegal logging. Higher public enforcement reduces illegal logging, but higher private enforcement may or may not reduce deforestation depending on migration pressures. Higher timber prices have an ambiguous effect on deforestation, but an increasing value of non-timber benefits decreases or leaves deforestation unchanged depending on the incentive structures of illegal loggers.

Common property resources are often used by households of developing countries as insurance in case of economic stress. The aim of this paper is to consider the potential poverty-trap implications of this use. If the capacity of the resource is low, or if the population in need of insurance is too large, the households are trapped in CPR extraction activity and cannot get more than their subsistence requirement. In this context, cooperation between households and the introduction of a cooperative insurance mechanism may sustain an equilibrium outside the poverty trap and relax pressure on the resource. Moreover, private insurance schemes could also be a potential solution to this poverty trap.

This paper, based on a computable general equilibrium model of the Indian economy, shows that a domestic carbon tax policy that recycles carbon tax revenues to households imposes heavy costs in terms of lower economic growth and higher poverty. However, the decline in economic growth and rise in poverty can be minimized if the emissions restriction target is modest, and carbon tax revenues are transferred exclusively to the poor. India's participation in an internationally tradable emission permits regime with grandfathered emissions allocation is preferable to any domestic carbon tax option, provided the world market price of emission permits remains low. Even better would be if India participated in a global system of tradable emission permits with equal per capita emission entitlements. India would then be able to use the revenues garnered from the sale of surplus permits to speed up its economic growth and poverty reduction and yet keep its per capita emissions below the 1990 per capita global emissions level.

We estimate annualized values of access to home tap water in three cities in El Salvador, and marginal ‘barrios’ in four Guatemalan cities, using a hedonic price method for studying changes in capitalized home values from obtaining a water connection. A tap water connection is found to add from 10 per cent to 52 per cent to sales values of homes in our sample. The estimated mean values of gaining tap water access represent 1–5 per cent of real household income, differing by city and with generally higher values in El Salvador. On average this gain eliminates between 1 per cent and 3 per cent of the initial difference in real incomes between the groups of connected and unconnected households. We also find large differences in the value of a tap connection depending on the main source of non-tap water, with lowest values when the source is a private well in El Salvador.

Climate change is increasing the intensity of extreme weather events. Mexico is particularly prone to suffer at least two different types of these events: droughts and hurricanes. This paper focuses on the effects of an extended drought on the Mexican economy. Through a computable general equilibrium model, we simulate the impact of a drought that affects primarily agriculture, livestock, forestry, and hydropower generation. We look at the effects on the overall economy. We then simulate the effects of several adaptation strategies in (chiefly) the agricultural, forestry, and power sectors, and we arrive at some tentative yet significant conclusions. We find that the effects of such an event vary substantially by sector with moderate to severe overall impacts. Furthermore, we find that adaptation policies can only effect modest changes to the economic losses to be suffered.

This paper presents the results of a dichotomous choice contingent valuation (CV) study of reduced flood risks in Bangladesh. Sensitivity of willingness to pay (WTP) to varying risk exposure levels is tested in a ‘natural experiment’, targeting floodplain residents facing regular annual flooding and a disaster flood once every five to ten years. Accounting for price, income and education levels, both subjective risk aversion and objective baseline risk exposure affect stated WTP for a common level of flood protection. We find a number of problems with the CV application in this specific developing country context. Half of the respondents are unable to pay in financial terms, but are willing to contribute in kind. The combined use of a monetary and non-monetary measure of WTP would have lowered the number of zero bids considerably. A test-retest carried out six months after the original survey shows that the stated WTP values are reliable.