This paper analyses the impact of citizens' actions for protecting the environment in the context of the institutional features of developing countries. The enforcement of environmental regulation is likely to be weak in developing countries, and thus their citizens are being compelled to sue the polluters or take direct actions that are costly to the polluter. The theoretical and empirical analysis, based on 25 cases of citizens' action from the Kerala State of India, show that their impact is influenced by the institutional deficiencies of the country. Such deficiencies include the delay in resolving conflicts through court interventions and the lower cost of taking actions of civil disobedience due to poor law and order enforcement. The analysis leads to the conclusion that citizens' actions may not be very effective in controlling pollution from existing factories, and may be effective in blocking the establishment of new factories. Both these outcomes, i.e., the continued pollution in existing factories, and zero-pollution (or non-establishment) of new factories/projects, cause social losses, in the former case for the citizens and in the latter for the polluter.

In a mixed farming system in which farmyard manure (FYM) is considered an important multipurpose renewable resource that can be used to enhance soil organic matter, provide additional income and supply household energy, soil fertility depletion could take place within the perspective of the household allocation pattern of FYM. This paper estimates a system of FYM allocation regressions to examine the role of returns to FYM and farmers' impatience on the propensity to allocate FYM to different uses. We parameterize the model using data from a sample of 493 households in Ethiopia. Results indicate a heightened incentive for diverting FYM from farming to marketing for burning outside the household when returns to selling FYM and the farmer's discount rate are high. These reveal the need for policies that will help to reduce farmers' impatience and encourage the substitution of alternative energy sources to increase the use of FYM as a sustainable land management practice.

This paper attempts to explore how the Taiwan government can effectively use subsidies to retire aquacultural farms based on the externality ground subsidence from pumping groundwater, using the town of Budai in Chia-Yi county as an example. The research first constructs the relationship between ground subsidence and groundwater consumption after taking the externality into consideration. An economic model that minimizes the total subsidy expenditure is then used for targeting the fish farms that need to be retired first in order to meet environmental goals. The results show that when the interaction caused by pumping groundwater among neighborhood farmers is considered, the responsibility for achieving the targets of environmental control is not evenly shared by aquacultural farmers. The location, and not the farm size, plays a more important role in determining whether environmental goals can be met.

This paper shows that strengthening land rights via a land certification program may reduce the negative economic impact of climatic anomalies in the highlands of Ethiopia. The results support the hypothesis that certification enhances the likelihood of adapting some of the land-related investments, thus supporting adaptation enhancing mechanisms and the resilience of the farming sector. Institutional factors may play a key role in supporting farmers’ adaptive capacity to climatic challenges.

A dynamic economic model for a biodiversity prospecting contract, between a host country and a pharmaceutical company, is developed and used to explain the structure of existing contracts. The host country's stocks of biodiversity and genetic information are crucial inputs to the production of high-quality samples. Even with compete property rights contracts will be second best; it is not possible to perfectly monitor host-country inputs to the drug discovery process. Contracts vary due to the different degrees of observability of host-country inputs, and incomplete or ineffective property rights.

We investigate households' decisions regarding livelihood activities in response to future climate change in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. We use the contingent behavior method and account for unobserved heterogeneity in order to overcome problems associated with limited data, collinearity and endogeneity. We characterize the climate change with two types of climate change scenarios: dry-spells and wet-spells. Results show that moderate and extreme increases in dry-spells increase adoption of off-farm activities such as casual labor and small business, and decrease adoption of on-farm activities such as gardening. We find opposite cases for mild or moderate wet-spells. Our results also show that households tend to diversify their livelihood portfolios in response to a moderate increase in dry-spells and a mild increase in wet-spells. Some household characteristics are also important in influencing some types of activities, including household's health status, gender of the household head, and household's prior experience.

Shocks related to weather variations have strong effects on developing countries’ economies. Climate change is expected to increase the occurrence and magnitude of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods or hurricanes that strongly affect agriculture and other activities. This special issue gathers literature reviews and case studies that aim to better understand heterogeneous impacts and their transmission channels, as well as to evaluate the impact of such weather shocks on developing economies, including Sub-Saharan African countries, India and Brazil.

This paper provides a Ricardian general equilibrium model to study the effect of foreign aid aimed at abating pollution in a small southern recipient economy. The government faces a dynamic problem as it chooses the emission level and abates pollution. The stock of pollution damages consumers and its law of motion is influenced by emission level and the stock of pollution as well as the level of abatement. We show that such type of aid increases emissions, but its effect on pollution stock is ambiguous in the absence of trade. With trade, aid reduces both pollution and emissions given that the recipient country has comparative advantage in the pollution-intensive good. Moreover, such type of aid can be immiserizing with or without trade.

Payments for environmental services have been popularly used in environmental management and an increasing number of studies assesses their contribution to local livelihoods. This study employs propensity score matching with a dataset of 404 indigenous households in the Central Highlands of Vietnam to evaluate the effect of payments for forest environmental services (PFES) on their livelihoods. Participating in PFES increased households' employment and income from activities related to natural forests. Income from PFES allowed households to enhance productive investment and promote income from cultivation activities. All of this, in turn, increased their annual income, job satisfaction, living expenditures, and reduced the amount of any loan. Additionally, PFES enhanced opportunities to participate in training courses and traditional community activities. This confirms that PFES is not only a good initiative for forest management but also a livelihood policy for communities.

This paper tests the pollution emissions and institutional quality nexus in Africa. Specifically, we analyze the effect of the political regime and the quality of political governance on CO2 emissions. To control for endogeneity, we apply the system generalized method of moments on a dynamic panel of African countries over the period 1996–2020. The key finding suggests that better institutions have a negative and significant effect on pollution in Africa. The findings also validate the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Moreover, the results support the pollution haven hypothesis. Finally, if digitalization significantly curbs pollution, then industrialization, natural resources, as well as the intensive use of energy, are considered as positive predictors. All the sensitivity and robustness tests globally validate the strength of the negative association between the good quality of institutions and the level of polluting emissions in Africa. The results call for some policy recommendations in environmental regulation for African economies.

Previous studies of deforestation have focused on agriculture, population and migration, timber exploitation, macroeconomic policies and geographic factors to explain the variability of deforestation rates among countries. This study tests the hypothesis that countries with a high proportion of petroleum or non-petroleum mineral exports in total exports experience a relatively low deforestation rate because of macroeconomic ‘Dutch disease’ effects. Bivariate and multivariate analyses provide preliminary support for the hypothesis, although they give little insight on how precisely mineral exports might exert their influence on forest cover. One reason for the limited utility of these methodologies is that they do not adequately explain the various effects of mineral windfalls that go beyond the Dutch disease's ‘core model’. Future research must attempt to understand these effects, which include: levels of funding for agriculture, roads, and directed settlement; agricultural protectionism; levels of rural poverty, urbanization, and consumer demand; the site-level effects of mineral extraction; and the variability of state autonomy.

Outdoor air pollution continues to be a challenging health issue, even as countries experience economic growth. By exploiting a unique transboundary setting in East Asia, we study the impact of an increase in particulate matter (PM) concentrations on fetal deaths. Due to the westerlies in the mid-latitudes, residents in South Korea at times experience intermittent exposure to high levels of air pollution. Using such atmospheric setting, we estimate a reduced-form impact of high PM events on fetal deaths, which captures in utero exposure to pollution. Controlling for local weather and pollution trends, regression results indicate that high PM events in Beijing lead to a significant increase in daily fetal mortality rates in Korea, by approximately 7.4 per cent. This research finding provides lower-bound estimates of not only negative spillovers manifested in fetal health but also the impact of pollution on the health of the Chinese population and calls for a need to tackle transboundary air pollution via international cooperation.

This paper uses two recent household surveys, together with data from the College for Control and Monitoring of Oil Revenues, to analyse the impact of oil revenues on wellbeing in Chad. Following a multiple-correspondence analysis to estimate a synthetic household-based multidimensional wellbeing (MDW) index, we used the difference-in-difference approach to assess the impact of oil revenues on average MDW at the department level. We found evidence that departments in Chad that received significant oil transfers have a higher MDW compared to those disadvantaged by the oil-revenue-redistribution policy. We conclude that, in order to promote economic inclusion, the government of Chad should better develop oil-revenue-redistribution policies according to local development needs and target the poorest departments.

Rare earth element extraction induces environmental damages and the balance problem. In this article, we show that recycling can challenge both problems in a two-period framework. We also find other results depending on the amount of scrap that can be recycled. If the recycling activity is not limited by available scrap, it does not change extraction in the first period. Environmental taxes on extracted quantities reduce extraction and favor recycling. But if the recycling is limited, the extractor reduces extraction in period one, adopting a foreclosure strategy, and environmental taxes can decrease recycling. In all cases, environmental taxes are never equal to the marginal damage from pollution, in order to take into account the recycling effect.

We examine the substitutability of waste and scrap exported from different countries by estimating the export demand functions of China. In particular, we focus on the export of other ferrous waste and scrap (HS code 720449) and other waste, parings and scrap of plastics (HS code 391590). It is shown that the substitutability of these wastes and scraps is weak among the exporting countries. Our empirical results imply that a uniform ban on trading hazardous waste, represented by the Basel Ban, could be an inefficient environmental policy.

Cash is often used in economic experiments as an incentive to encourage realistic decision making or to compensate participants for their time. However, in many less developed countries, remunerating participants with cash can upset existing relationships with local institutions. In cases where the use of cash is not feasible, an alternative type of payment is required. Using a framed field experiment in Odisha, India (formerly Orissa), we explore an alternative payment method, in-kind, where typical household items are used in place of cash. We compare the differences in the valuation of yield stabilizing seed traits between in-kind and cash. Our results suggest that farmers are willing to pay less for seeds when they are paid cash than when they are paid in-kind. Bids are higher by 1.18 Indian Rupees when farmers are paid in-kind, corresponding to about a 7 per cent higher valuation.

This paper studies the impact of trade openness and the proportion of exporters on environmental quality through the scale, composition and technique effects from 1998 to 2007 using firm- and city-level data for 287 Chinese cities. Our results reveal that, on average, trade openness has a detrimental impact on the environment in Chinese cities, but this impact remains heterogeneous across regions. A higher proportion of exporters improves the environment in central and eastern cities while generating nevertheless more pollution in western cities. As regards the sector-specific impact, we find that the higher proportion of exporters in the mining and less-polluting manufacturing sectors in eastern cities diminishes the emissions of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5). Our finding also suggests that a pollution haven effect emerges in China at the city level. Finally, our results confirm the presence of an environmental Kuznets curve effect for the PM2.5 pollutant across Chinese cities.

I consider that the field of environment and development economics (EDE) began with the publication of The Control of Resources by Partha Dasgupta (1982). Although he did not confine his focus to developing countries, Dasgupta (1982: 10) suggested that managing environmental resources was much broader than conventional resource stock depletion or pollution control: