Agroindustrialization and agricultural commercialization are both consequences of economic growth and urbanization. Commercialization of agricultural systems leads to greater market orientation; progressive substitution out of non-traded inputs for purchased inputs; and the decline of integrated farming systems. Agricultural commercialization can have both negative and positive impacts on the natural resource base. Higher opportunity cost of labor increases farmer reliance on herbicides for weed control, primarily for the staple crops. The use of insecticides and fungicides could also rise, especially for high value fruit and vegetable crops. Increased use of agricultural chemicals could lead to higher environmental and human health risks. On the other hand, global integration and the consequent rationalization of agricultural policies could have significant environmental benefits, especially in terms of a reduced rate of salinity build up and ground water depletion in irrigated environments. The extent to which positive environmental effects manifest themselves depends on both macroeconomic and microeconomic policy reforms.

We use aggregate data to estimate supply, price, land-use, and greenhouse gas impacts of genetically engineered (GE) seed adoption due both to increased yield per hectare (intensive margin) and increased planted area (extensive margin). An adoption model with profitability and risk considerations distinguishes between the two margins, where the intensive margin results from direct ‘gene’ impacts and higher complimentary input use, and the extensive margin reflects the growing range of lands that become profitable with the GE technology. We identify yield increases from cross-country time series variation in GE adoption share within the main GE crops – cotton, corn and soybeans. We find that GE increased yields 34 per cent for cotton, 12 per cent for corn and 3 per cent for soybeans. We then estimate the quantity of extensive margin lands from year-to-year changes in traditional and GE planted area. If all production on the extensive margin is attributed to GE technology, the supply effect of GE increases from 5 per cent to 12 per cent for corn, 15 per cent to 20 per cent for cotton, and 2 per cent to 40 per cent for soybeans, generating significant downward pressure on prices. Finally, we compute ‘saved’ lands and greenhouse gases as the difference between observed hectarage per crop and counterfactual hectarage needed to generate the same output without the yield boost from GE. We find that altogether, GE saved 13 million hectares of land from conversion to agriculture in 2010, and averted emissions are equivalent to roughly one-eighth of the annual emissions from automobiles in the US.

This paper reviews recent developments in the study of the so-called ‘double dividend’, i.e. the possibility of improving the environment and, at the same time, reducing the distortions of the tax system through revenue-neutral green taxes. The main goal of the analysis is to identify the relationship between the modeling strategy and the double dividend results. Recent modeling advances are considered at both the theoretical and the empirical levels. In particular, we note that the most significant theoretical advances have been made in the direction of allowing for imperfectly competitive markets, especially the market for labor. At the same time, we argue that empirical work, particularly on the ‘employment double dividend’, is still relatively scant and that much more needs to be done both in the direction of more realistic empirical models and of an extended sensitivity analysis of the main findings.

This paper examines ways in which development policies interact and influence incentives for agricultural expansion in frontier areas. We develop a model of household response to economic and technical stimuli, conditional on agronomic and household characteristics. We evaluate the model empirically using survey data gathered from low-income corn and vegetable farms near a national park in the southern Philippines. We find that within farms, land allocation is responsive to relative crop prices and yields. However, different crops elicit different responses. In particular, some crop expansion takes place primarily through land substitution and intensified input use, while changes in prices or yields of other crops induce an expansion of total farm area. Land and family labor constraint bind at different points for different crops. These results suggest that because multiple policies interact, environmental policies must have multiple strands in order to replace incentives to further land expansion.

JEL codes: Q12, Q24, O13.

The paper analyses the conflict between wildlife conservation and its accompanying land-use in an East African context. In the model there are two agents. First, there is an agency managing the wildlife and the habitat of the wildlife, which is referred to as parkland. On the other hand, there is the group of agro-pastoralists living in the vicinity of the wildlife habitat, whose land-use is referred to as rangelands. The parkland is used for tourism production and hunting, while the rangelands are used for agro-pastoral production. Both agents will find it beneficial to expand their land-use, so there is a land-use conflict. This is analysed in two steps. First, social optimality is studied; then we study the utilization of the wildlife and its accompanying land-use when there is no unified resource policy and the park agency follows its self-interest. The effects on the two different management schemes of changing economic conditions, such as the recommendations of the CITES convention and a programme subsidizing agro-pastoral production, are discussed.

This paper is concerned with the regulation of irrigation water via pricing. The main concepts underlying efficient water use are first discussed and then applied in actual practice to demonstrate empirically how readily available data can be used to implement pricing schemes that achieve efficient allocation of water. The policy discussion includes also equity considerations. The empirical findings, however, reveal that water prices have a small effect on income distribution within the farming sector, thereby supporting the view that water pricing should be designed primarily to increase the efficiency of water use, leaving income distribution considerations to other policy tools.

International negotiations for an agreement to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases have not produced cost-effective policies for reducing emissions, not least because they are unlikely to prevent ‘leakage’ through a re-location of carbon-intensive activities to poorer countries. An alternative or supplementary approach that is more likely to achieve at least some emission reductions, and at the same time generate national and global economic benefits rather than costs, involves lowering coal subsidies and trade barriers. Past coal policies have encouraged excessive production of coal in a number of industrial countries and excessive coal consumption in numerous developing and transition economies. This paper documents those distortions and outlines the circumstances under which their reform (currently under way in some countries) could both improve the economy and lower greenhouse gas emissions globally. It then quantifies the effects on economic activity as well as global carbon emissions, using the G-Cubed multi-country general equilibrium model of the world economy. Both the gains in economic efficiency and the reductions in carbon dioxide emissions that could result from such reforms are found to be substantial—a ‘no regrets’ outcome or win–win Pareto improvement for the economy and the environment.

If children contribute to the household by using their time to collect natural resources from common property sources—such as collecting firewood, fetching water, collecting fodder, grazing animals—then local depletion of these resources could potentially increase the demand for children. This feedback could create a dynamically unstable ‘vicious circle’ between population growth and resource depletion. We empirically examine several elements of such a ‘vicious circle’ hypothesis using data from Pakistan with unusually rich detail on both child time use and firewood collection activities. We find that collection activities do absorb a substantial part of household resources; that children's tasks are relatively devoted to collection activities; that child time is a significant, but not a dominant, portion of collection activities; and the presence of older children in the household reduces the time that women devote to household tasks. Exploratory multivariate regressions show a partial correlation between indicators of firewood scarcity and fertility—a relationship that varies across regions of Pakistan.

This article develops a model of wild-resource exploitation that includes both the standard bioeconomic properties of growth and harvesting and a species-area relationship linked to habitat conversion. The model is developed for both a closed and an open economy. In the closed-economy model the characteristics of the long-run equilibrium are analysed in three versions of the model: the basic bioeconomic model, the inclusion of habitat conversion and the addition of biodiversity value. In the case of the open-economy model, we also examine the potential effects of trade interventions on the optimal exploitation of species and habitat conversion in the long run. The results confirm that the inclusion of habitat conversion as well as biodiversity value in a model of wild-resource exploitation yields significantly different outcomes than a basic bioeconomic model.

Conservationists promote non-timber forest products (NTFP) to simultaneously alleviate poverty and conserve ecosystems. Unfortunately, little is known about how such products actually contribute to poverty alleviation, or how various complementary policies such as green marketing campaigns or cooperative management might impact resource health and users' welfare. This paper develops a simple NTFP extraction model that focuses on spatial and labor market dimensions of use in both managed and unmanaged settings. The model contrasts patterns of spatial use, resource health, and income generation under open access and community-managed institutions. We then test the conceptual model by investigating the case of xate production in the rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, using survey work conducted over two separate periods. The empirical investigation reveals spatial patterns and labor market outcomes predicted by the model. We find NTFP use is mainly conducted by households with low opportunity costs of time and fewer income generation opportunities.

This study uses a global climate-energy-economy model to investigate potential implications of linking credits from reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries to a global carbon market, focusing on reducing emissions from deforestation (RED) and effects on energy technology innovation. Integrating RED into a global carbon market lowers the estimated total costs of a policy to achieve 535 ppmv of CO2-equivalent concentrations in 2100 by up to 25 per cent. Alternatively, a global RED program could enable additional reductions of about 20 ppmv by 2100 with no added costs compared with an energy-sector-only policy. The results indicate that market linkage of RED induces modest reductions in clean energy innovation overall but slightly enhances development of particular technologies, including carbon capture and storage. We also find that RED in combination with credit banking encourages greater mitigation in the near term, enhancing flexibility to potentially tighten emission targets at lower cost in response to future information.

In a choice experiment, households in Vietnam are offered flood insurance to mitigate increasing catastrophic flood risks due to climate change. Participants are asked to choose their most preferred insurance policy given expected future flood and mortality risks, insurance cover and associated insurance premiums. Although not affordable to everyone, there exists substantial demand for flood insurance. Insurance demand is spatially differentiated, non-linear in flood probabilities and mortality risks, and subject to significant preference heterogeneity. Since respondents are unfamiliar with the concept of flood insurance and education levels are low, choice consistency tests were conducted. These show that choice consistency depends on a combination of respondent characteristics, such as gender and education level, and experimental design characteristics.

A number of developing countries have come to face the growing problems of municipal solid waste management caused by rapid economic growth. Although there are many studies on the environmental Kuznets curve, very few address the issue of municipal solid waste, and there is still controversy concerning the validity of the waste version of the Kuznets curve hypothesis. It is demonstrated that the turning point for household municipal solid waste is approximately 3.7 million yen per person, which is far less than the maximum income in the sample and valid evidence for absolute decoupling. The success of our study partially stems from our highly disaggregated data and use of spatial econometrics. The former aspect indicates that distinguishing between household and business waste reveals the waste–income relationship, whereas the latter indicates the importance of peer effects when municipal governments formulate waste-reduction policies.

We analyse data from sample surveys of water use and prices for households in 17 cities in Central America and Venezuela. In some of the cities, almost all sampled households have tap water, but in others many rely on nontap (‘coping’) sources. Coping households use less than one-fifth as much water as metered tap households do, face average water prices ten times as high, are much poorer, and face substantial water hauling costs. Water demand functions are estimated for metered tap households and coping households separately and jointly. Increasing block rates complicate estimation on metered tap households. Using 2SLS, we find price elasticities of water demand, with respect to both average and marginal water price, of about −0.3, with average price giving the greater partial effect. Coping demand has price elasticity closer to −0.1, and is also negatively affected by increased hauling costs. Estimations on the joint data indicate that the water connection itself explains most of the difference between tap and coping consumption and indicate serious problems in such data pooling.

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.

Technological modernization is widely believed to contribute positively both to economic development and to environmental and resource conservation, through improvements in productivity and strengthening of business competitiveness. However, this may not always be true, particularly in the short term, as it requires substantial investments and may impose financial burdens on firms undertaking such investments. This study empirically examines the effects of technological modernization in China's iron and steel industry in the 1990s on conventional economic productivity (CEP) and environmentally sensitive productivities (ESPs). We employ a directional distance function that can handle multiple inputs and outputs to compute relative production efficiencies. We apply these models to the data covering 27 iron and steel firms in China between 1990 and 1999 – a period when the Chinese iron and steel industry modernized rapidly. We find that ESPs have continuously improved, even in the period when the CEP declined.

In developing countries, the rapid proliferation of informal firms – low-technology unlicensed micro-enterprises – is having significant environmental impacts. Yet environmental management authorities typically ignore such firms. This paper estimates the annual net benefits (benefits minus costs) of controlling particulate emissions from a collection of informal brick kilns in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and from two of the city's leading formal industrial polluters. We find that the annual net benefits of controlling brick kiln emissions are substantial – in the tens of millions of dollars – and exceed those for the two formal industrial facilities by a significant margin. These results suggest that, in some cases, the conventional allocation of pollution control resources across formal and informal polluters may be suboptimal.

Previous authors have been unable to agree on whether environmental regulations hinder foreign direct investment (FDI). The empirical evidence in this domain remains inconclusive because of the contrasting results observed in the literature, owing to the differing characteristics of the data sets and models used in previous studies. The present study carries out a meta-analysis on a sample of published and unpublished papers on the so-called pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) in order to investigate whether certain aspects of research design affect the presented findings. The paper offers explanations for the mixed findings reported in the literature by suggesting that certain aspects of research design are crucial to explaining their significance. The PHH is more likely to be supported by studies that define FDI as the establishment of new plants and those that use government spending as a proxy for the strictness of environmental regulations. Moreover, focusing investigations on pollution-intensive industries or developing countries hardly increases the likelihood of achieving results that support the PHH.

This paper is not concerned with advances in game theory. Rather, the paper is concerned with the relevance, if any, of game theory to a major resource management issue, namely the management of internationally shared fishery resources. It is argued that the economics of the management of such resources cannot, in fact, be understood, other than through the lens of game theory. The paper discusses several elementary game theory concepts that are of utmost policy relevance, but which are, as of yet, poorly understood by most policy makers. The paper does, in addition, discuss a key policy problem in the management of shared fishery resources that demands a game-theoretic analysis. The required analysis, however, has yet to be developed.

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.