The literature on the impacts of transport corridors points to a tradeoff between income and environmental quality. We estimate the impacts of India's Golden Quadrilateral and North-South-East-West highways on income and environmental quality to test this tradeoff hypothesis. Applying the difference-in-difference method to district level data, we find that the highways increased both local income and particulate matter air pollution. The estimated increase in air pollution is robust to using an instrumental variables approach, while that in income is not. Examining heterogeneity in these impacts, we find that the income–environment tradeoff was less steep in districts with initially higher educational attainment rates because they experienced a smaller increase in air pollution due to the highways.

Paul Ehrlich has written a wonderful article with the purpose to convince economists to switch their research interests to what he calls ecological economics. His argument is twofold. If our intellectual capacity is not geared towards these issues, humanity may be heading for a big disaster. Secondly, it gives tremendous opportunities for economists: the ones who switch will end up in the centre of the profession, because society will be in big need of their expertise.

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of the joint impact of foreign aid and oil taxes on the revenues of a rich oil importing country (North) and a two-class, oil exporting country (South). Without coordination, oil taxes are strictly higher in the North and the global allocation of oil is inefficient. Moreover, oil taxes in the North extract some of the South's oil rents, undoing the revenue transfers from foreign aid. We show that a policy coordination mechanism reduces inefficiencies and improves global welfare.

The notion of intertemporal h-option value is introduced to extend to environmental decision-making problems of the concept of quasi-option value, defined by Arrow and Fisher and Henry, whenever an individual faces imprecise information, or hard uncertainty, represented by a non-additive measure over events. Under hard uncertainty and irreversibility, the decision-maker faces the intertemporal h-option value, that is an uncertainty premium of preservation, which represents the gain from being able to learn about the future consequences of irreversible actions. The intertemporal h-option value is a correction factor that has to be taken into account in evaluating the total economic value of feasible actions.

Coral bleaching is associated with large income shocks and a substantial decrease in protein consumption among the affected fishery households in Indonesia [Chaijaroen (2019) Long-lasting income shocks and adaptations: evidence from coral bleaching in Indonesia. Journal of Development Economics136, 119–136]. According to the health and economics literature, early childhood exposures to shocks such as those from coral bleaching can have long-lasting effects on health, schooling, and other later-life outcomes. This paper explores how the mass coral bleaching in 1998 affected household decisions on fertility and child development. Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) and a triple differences approach, results from 2000 suggest an increase in fertility and an increased likelihood of severe childhood stunting among the affected households. For comparison, rainfall shocks are associated with a decrease in fertility and smaller adverse effects on child health and schooling outcomes. This study suggests that the effects of coral bleaching might have been underestimated, and our findings yield more targeted policy recommendations on climate shock mitigation.

We investigate the effect of women's political representation in the state legislative assembly and public administration on natural disaster mortality in 20 Indian states from 1981 to 2019. The paper combines two critical dimensions: political and administrative representation of women and disaster risk reduction. Results suggest that women's political representation reduces total disaster mortality after controlling socioeconomic and political covariates; however, the effects are statistically insignificant for the current and lag periods. We find that a one standard deviation increase in women's representation in public administration lowers total disaster mortality by 20.6 percentage points, which is 9.8 per cent of the sample mean. We observe the impacts of female administrative representation on gender-specific human development outcomes through reduced male and female disaster mortality, and we explain some mechanisms. Thus, women's political and administrative representation is crucial for addressing disaster mortality as it has major public health consequences.

The water purification functions of forests represent one of the most frequently invoked examples of nonmarket ecosystem services that are economically valuable. This study quantifies the monetary value of forests' water purification services in the form of the ensuing cost savings of municipal drinking water treatment, using a rich panel dataset from China's Sichuan province. Moreover, this study has undertaken a novel spatial piecewise approach to investigate the spatial patterns of such cost savings delivered by forests at different distances from the water intake point. The estimation results find that forests within a 2 km radius upstream from the water intake point have the most sizeable and statistically significant cost saving effect. For forests within a 3 km radius, this effect becomes somewhat smaller but remains statistically significant. Beyond a 4 km radius, this effect becomes notably smaller and statistically equal to zero. Our analysis facilitates the optimal spatial targeting of forest conservation.

Although the impacts of income, population growth, and other important determinants of land-use change have been widely studied, there is less understanding of how spatial spillovers matter. Utilizing a spatial econometric approach, we investigate the main determinants of natural landscape conversion, focusing on quantifying local and global spatial spillovers. The empirical investigation applies to the Edmonton Metropolitan Region and the Calgary Regional Partnership in Canada. Key results include: (1) determinants of land conversion have significant spillover effects; (2) income, population density, road density, natural land endowment and land suitability for agriculture are all found to have influences on natural land conversion both in the own and neighboring areas; and (3) local (i.e., within the immediate neighboring areas) and global (in the entire study region) spillovers are different in strength and direction. Our work provides useful information for understanding the spillover issues in land conservation, resource governance, and optimal conservation design.

The effective labor possibilities frontier (ELPF) is defined as the set of statically efficient allocations of labor inputs in the competing tasks of production and R&D. It is concave if labor is heterogeneous. In an R&D-based growth model with an essential non-renewable natural resource, the shape of the ELPF affects the optimal speed of the transition. If resource endowment is poor, transition is slower and involves a smaller R&D effort, and slower growth in per capita consumption, in the case of a heterogeneous labor force as compared to a homogeneous one. Policies that modify the distribution of skills in the population imply shifts of the ELPF. We provide a taxonomy of possible shifts of the ELPF, and link them to education policy or demographic trends.

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.

Tropical deforestation has been one of the most significant global environmental changes of recent decades and has spurred a substantial academic literature. Despite this, the empirical literature provides inconsistent evidence on the role of basic economic determinants of deforestation such as income and population. The authors suggest that one explanation for this inconsistency is a tendency to use incomplete or incorrect dynamic regression specifications. They derive three plausible dynamic empirical model specifications and compare their performance both with each other and with an ad hoc model typical of those used in the literature. Statistical tests support the use of more completely specified models which allow for dynamic adjustment of forest cover.

Using a vertically differentiated product model, the paper aims to investigate the effects of economic growth on market provision of product quality. The quality attribute considered is the environmental friendliness of products. Economic growth is modeled as a shift in income distribution. It shows that the effect of economic growth depends on the form it takes. A growth in income that is uniform across consumers improves the cleanup levels adopted by both firms. However, a growth in income that is accompanied by changes in income inequality may result in the lowering of one of the two qualities. More specifically, if the growth in income is accompanied by increased disparities in income distribution, the quality of the (environmentally) inferior variant is reduced. This has serious implications for the poor consumers if the product has safety or health hazards. The paper suggests a regulatory measure to prevent such deterioration in the quality of the inferior variant.