Ensuring energy access for rural households is crucial for global sustainable development. Technologies like liquefied petroleum gas, biogas, and efficient cookers are touted as solutions, yet their adoption remains limited despite their potential health, economic, and environmental benefits. We conducted a meta-analysis of 50 studies in developing countries, integrating contextual factors to explore gender and other determinants impacting rural energy transition. Our findings underscore socioeconomic status, social capital, environmental concerns, and gender dynamics as pivotal factors. Notably, women's involvement boosts adoption rates by 7.90 per cent, yet cultural barriers often sideline them from these processes. Thus, our recommendations stress addressing women's roles as energy technology users to foster inclusive energy transitions.

This paper analyzes inequities in the distribution of air pollution in Mexico at the detailed scale of localities. We find that air pollution increases in areas that experience a decline in socioeconomic status. We utilize 15 years of remote sensing data on fine particulate matter (smaller than 2.5 microns) for more than 116,500 localities across Mexico. Our panel data models show that localities that face a decline in socioeconomic status experience a 0.24–0.83 per cent increase in annual mean pollution concentrations. Our results hold up to controlling for changes within each municipality and instrumenting with broader municipality level socioeconomic status to test for ecological fallacy. We find that local air pollution inequities are reduced by political participation channels, but not as much by increased share of manufacturing activities due to polluters locating in poorer neighborhoods. Highly dense, urban municipalities witness higher inequities most likely due to traffic, construction, and agricultural fires.

This study applies surveys of business and household expenditure to draw inferences about the size of regional multipliers to assess the cascading economic impacts of the data-limited Indonesian tropical tuna fishery. The average business-level production multiplier was estimated at around 1.3 across survey respondents, while household-level consumption effects were considerably higher, with the total economic effect roughly three times larger than the production value. A statistical analysis using generalized additive models suggests that there is considerable difference in production multipliers across regions, driven by the individual characteristics of operators, such as revenue/profit, size of the boat, type of gear, and the class of the port where the business is located. This research has the potential to provide a practical management tool to measure flow-on economic impacts of a fishery when information necessary for more formal economic analysis is unavailable, such as for data-limited fisheries or small regional studies.

We examine how agricultural subsidies may induce deforestation and interact with conservation programs by analyzing two large-scale national programs in Mexico that have existed simultaneously for more than a decade: an agricultural subsidy for livestock (PROGAN) and a program of payments for ecosystem services (PES). Looking across the entire Mexican landscape, we exploit the surprises in the timing of enrollment in PROGAN's waves, fluctuations in program payments, and the change in the value of the subsidy induced by inflation and currency fluctuations to identify the impacts of the livestock subsidy on environmental outcomes. We find that PROGAN increased municipal deforestation by 7 per cent. The deforestation effects of PROGAN were smaller in municipalities with higher concentrations of PES recipients. We suggest that livestock subsidies could be better targeted to places with low deforestation risk and high livestock productivity to maximize food production and minimize negative externalities caused by deforestation.

The presence of monitoring institutions affects quality and effort of leaders. We investigate the effect of intensified monitoring on the ability and effort of leaders for a sample of forest user groups in Ethiopia, and find experimental and non-experimental evidence of an important trade-off: monitoring increases leaders' effort but lowers their quality in terms of education and experience. This effort–ability trade-off only occurs in the presence of alternative income opportunities (affecting the opportunity cost of time) and only among a subsample of leaders with low prosocial motivation. For our context, we document that the net effect of monitoring on economic outcomes is positive.

The predictions of the adverse effects of greenhouse gas emissions on climate change are now accepted. Somewhat less attention has been given to the economic, social, and political consequences. The three interact: the former will have social and political effects, which in turn will harm economies and economic well-being. This analysis of poor countries draws on much recent evidence and various projections. Climate damage contributes to internal political instability and conflict. There is a risk that poor countries will be driven down economically, so reducing the capacity of their governments: some will become fragile states. Internal migration is likely to become a central policy issue. However, international migration will also grow. Climate damage will drag countries into both cooperation and conflict with each other. The effects on sending countries, contiguous countries, and destination countries are examined. This scenario presented is predictive but should be taken as a warning.

We propose a model of international oligopoly with two countries, two vertically-differentiated goods, and heterogeneous consumers in terms of their willingness to pay for quality. Various sources of pollution are taken into account: consumption, production and the transportation of goods between the two countries. Green persuaded consumers display consumption home bias: they derive additional satisfaction when consuming a domestic good because buying locally abates transportation pollution. We investigate whether consumption home bias effectively curbs global emissions. Finally, we uncover the environmental role played by the globalization of markets.

We estimate the impact of subsequent droughts on the revenues of farmers in Ethiopia factoring in their adaptive capacity. We find that after the first drought, there is no significant difference in the revenue of the farmers who experienced a drought, as compared to those who did not. However, there is a loss in revenue after the second drought, specifically for those farmers that are endowed with less assets. This finding underscores that a rise in the frequency of extreme events and shocks can potentially have significant local distributional implications, with wealth as a major distinguishing factor.

Natural resource extraction is an important livelihood strategy for poor rural households in developing and emerging countries. Despite the sharp decline in poverty in Vietnam, inequality still exists between the ethnic majority and minority. This paper aims to analyze the impact of natural resource extraction on ethnic inequality. We use panel data from Dak Lak in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that ethnic differences in extraction are due to different group characteristics and different returns to these characteristics. Endogenous switching regressions find that extraction has heterogeneous effects on consumption across extracting and non-extracting households, and between majority and minority households. Treatment effects suggest that extraction sustains the consumption of extracting minority households because their consumption would decline if they stopped extracting. Our results indicate that it is important to improve the natural resource base and the ability of minorities to cope with shocks.

This paper empirically investigates the economic effects of environmental activities. To be specific, it investigates the interactive influence of firms' environmental management and environmental innovation on their productivity. We consider both internal and external environmental management practices of global firms observed from 41 countries between 2017 and 2019. We also consider both inputs and outputs of firms' innovation activities that aim to reduce environmental impacts. Multiple indices are constructed to comprehensively evaluate firms' environmental activities, and productivity is estimated with a semi-parametric method. We find that environmental management and environmental innovation are directly correlated to each other and both substantially promote productivity; however, they tend to substitute each other's positive effects on productivity. Other variables such as globalization, government, labor inputs, and informal competition strongly affect firm productivity too.

Recently, in their 2019 paper, Poyago-Theotoky and Yong consider a managerial Cournot duopoly with pollution externalities and emission taxes and propose an explicit environmental incentive in a managerial compensation contract. The authors compare several exogenous equilibria emerging in the symmetric sub-games in which the owner offers either the environmental delegation contract or the standard sales delegation contract: abatement and social welfare (resp. emission taxes) under environmental delegation are higher (resp. lower) than under sales delegation. The present work extends their model using a game-theoretic approach to analyse the asymmetric sub-games, in which only one firm adopts the environmental contract, and adds the contract decision stage. Results show that the environmental contract never emerges as the unique sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium of this non-cooperative managerial decision game. Indeed, if the green R&D technology is efficient, the sales contract emerges as the unique Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium. Otherwise, if the green R&D technology is inefficient, multiple Nash equilibria in pure strategies exist (coordination game). Our findings offer direct policy implications.

The potential impact of climate change on international migration patterns has recently received considerable attention, yet much of the empirical literature fails to find increases in international migration due to climate change. This paper attempts to resolve this “immobility paradox” by applying a real-options framework to the relationship between climate change and international migration. This framework suggests that individuals may postpone their migration response to climate change in the face of uncertainty and only migrate once impacts of climate change have exceeded certain thresholds. We test this prediction using semiparametric regression methods which allow us to empirically identify the threshold effects implied by the real-options framework. However, the findings are generally inconsistent with such threshold effects. Rather, the results suggest that in low-income countries, individuals’ migration response is hampered by the existence of liquidity constraints. These are likely to become more binding due to climate change-induced decreases in agricultural productivity.

In this paper, we use a discrete choice experiment conducted among pastoralists in four different semi-arid counties in Kenya characterized by different land tenure regimes to analyze how pastoralists make tradeoffs between tenure security and grazing flexibility – the so-called pastoralist paradox. Results show that there is one group of respondents who are desperate for change and seem to prefer either group or private title deeds to their current situation. A second, smaller group has strong preferences for the status quo, which could be driven by their relatively short migration distances. Concerning index-based livestock insurance, the basis risk suffered by insured pastoralists due to underprediction is high, but willingness to pay (WTP) for livestock insurance should still be high enough to ensure maximum uptake, leaving current low uptakes hard to explain. The worry about climate change is high but does not translate into increased WTP for more secure tenure or formal livestock insurance.

Nigeria is endowed with abundant sunshine year-round; thus, solar PV would solve the environmental problems associated with petrol-powered generators. However, it is unclear whether households are willing to transition. Thus, we analyze households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for solar PV under four scenarios: (i) WTP when a solar PV is complemented with a generator, (ii) WTP when a solar PV completely displaces a generator, (iii) WTP when a solar PV is complemented with a generator, plus a subsidy, and (iv) WTP when a solar PV completely displaces a generator, given a subsidy. We find that WTP for solar PV is higher when it can displace generators completely. Subsidy plus monthly rather than upfront payment would scale up the adoption of solar PV by about 6 per cent. Furthermore, the cost benefit analysis results show that solar PV investment is profitable. Thus, there is a need to implement policies aimed at scaling up the energy transition.

Environmental violation by enterprises is a common problem in environmental management worldwide. To restrict enterprises' environmental pollution behaviors, China has implemented a public supervision system based on environmental information publicity, which guides the public to participate in environmental governance and supervises enterprises' environmental pollution behaviors. This study exploits a quasi-natural experiment based on the disclosure policy of the Pollution Information Transparency Index in China from 2008 and the difference-in-differences method to evaluate the disclosure effect of public supervision on enterprises' environmental violations, and to examine its environmental benefits and their realization path. We find that the public supervision system is conducive to the disclosure of enterprises' environmental violations. At the same time, public supervision has achieved the expected environmental benefits, mainly realized by reducing enterprises' output to reduce polluting emissions, and this mechanism is more obvious for high-polluting enterprises.

This study aims to understand how Rwandan farmers value the improved characteristics of climate services introduced to them in a choice experiment setting. Data were collected from 1,525 household heads in November 2019. A random parameters logit model was used to analyze the data. Results suggest that Rwandan farmers value forecast accuracy, dissemination through a combination of extension agents and the Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture process, and bundling with market price information. This study suggests that to improve agricultural management planning and food security of farmers through the provision of climate services, these services need to be accurate, user-tailored, and accessible.

Most decisions involving risk are not taken in isolation. In addition to the risk from that decision, other independent, so-called ‘background’ risks, are considered. Our research adds to the growing evidence that this background risk influences risk-taking. We report results from a repeated lab-in-the-field investment task with Senegalese fishers in the presence of background risk related to their fishing income and their health. Our measure of background risk is the monthly wind condition. Without controls, we find that fishers act on average intemperately. Adding controls, we find that the impact of background risk on risk-taking—measured as the investment in the investment task—depends on the boat size of the fishers. When dividing the sample according to wealth, we find temperate behavior for the relatively poorer group and intemperate behavior that depends on boat lengths for the relatively richer group. Our results show the interrelations between background risk and context factors.

Insights on the indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are critical for designing and implementing policies to alleviate the food security burden it may have caused, and for bolstering rural communities against similar macroeconomic shocks in the future. Yet estimating the causal effects of the pandemic is difficult due to its ubiquitous nature and entanglement with other shocks. In this descriptive study, we combine high-resolution satellite imagery to control for plot-level rainfall with household socio-economic panel data from 2014, 2016, 2019 and 2020, to differentiate the effect of the pandemic from climatic shocks on food security in Morogoro, Tanzania. We find evidence of decreased incomes, increased prices of staple foods, and increased food insecurity in 2020 relative to previous years, and link these changes to the pandemic by asking households about their perceptions of COVID-19. Respondents overwhelmingly attribute economic hardships to the pandemic, with perceived impacts differing by asset level.

Exposure to extreme shocks in early life is found to have a lasting impact in adulthood. Exploiting the variation in exposure measured by age and intensity of an earthquake, we evaluate the impact of a 7.7 MW earthquake in Gujarat, India, on the health stock of children who were in utero or below three years. Using the India Human Development Survey data from 2004–05 and earthquake intensity data, we find an affected girl child to be shorter by at least 2.5 cm at the age of 3–6 years. The earthquake seems to have destroyed the household infrastructures and health facilities, affecting the expecting mothers and newborn children. The households using services to meet nutritional needs of children and pregnant women seem to be least affected. Our findings recommend faster reconstruction activities and highlight the importance of universal healthcare and nutritional delivery services to mitigate the impacts of early-life shocks.

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are significant for poverty alleviation, but are threatened by over-exploitation and climate change effects such as drastic drops in regrowth rates. How will fishers adapt? To shed light on this, we ran a common-pool resource experiment with SSF fishers in Thailand. Our results show that groups confronted with a potential abrupt drop in the regrowth rate are more likely to form cooperative agreements compared to groups not confronted with such a drop, which theory cannot predict. However, groups that form cooperative agreements do not necessarily manage the resource efficiently; many groups under-exploit. Over-exploitation is driven by individual characteristics, e.g., if individuals can diversify income, and if they are born outside the village. We conclude that more systematic exploration of the role of socio-economic factors, and how these factors interact with ecological conditions facing fishers, are needed. Our work can be seen as one step in this direction.