This study investigates the effects of ‘time to think’ and ‘ballot box’ on willingness-to-pay, while providing the first empirical evidence on assessing the benefits of an air quality improvement program in urban Africa. Our hypothetical referendum scenario proposes to reduce the air pollution related morbidity rate in Douala, Cameroon by 25 per cent in exchange for a one-time surcharge on the electricity bill of each respondent. We find that on average WTP decreases by nearly one-fourth when allocating respondents time to think but markedly increases when we use a ‘ballot box’ approach allowing respondents to state their willingness privately. Our results suggest that on average households are willing to pay US$0.42 per month (0.2 per cent of household annual income). We conclude that total citywide benefits are unlikely to exceed the costs of implementing such a program at this point, although this situation may change quickly with increasing economic growth.

This paper analyzes the potential effects of climate change on Brazilian agriculture by considering irrigation as an adaptive strategy. Investigations were performed to determine how climatic variability influences irrigation and whether this adaptive measure actually reduces producers' vulnerability to climate change. We used a simultaneous equations model with endogenous switching to account for the heterogeneity in the decision of whether to use adaptive measures. We compared the expected land values under the actual and counterfactual cases of farm households that either adapt or do not adapt to climate change. Simulation results show that irrigation can be an effective tool for counteracting the harmful effects of climate change. The income of farmers tends to increase on lands where irrigation technologies are practiced. These conclusions confirm the need to invest in adaptation strategies to prepare Brazil for coping with the adverse effects of global climate change.

This paper aims to assess the effect of natural disasters closely related to climate change on migration rates in developing countries, observing how this effect varies according to the level of education. We investigate this relationship by using panel data that measure international migration from developing countries to the main OECD destination countries. Estimations are made with a pair-country fixed effects estimator. The results show that natural disasters are positively associated with emigration rates. Furthermore, we show that natural disasters may exacerbate the brain drain in developing countries when they are at their most vulnerable and need greater support from skilled workers. We also find that the effect of natural disasters on migration varies depending on the geographical location of countries, as well as according to the type of disaster.

We investigate the consequences of remittances inflows on the macroeconomic performance of West African countries over the 1985–2007 period. We take into account the exposure of those countries to climate variability by estimating a PCHVAR model which allows heterogeneity between countries’ responses to rainfall shocks. Our results show that the impact of remittances on macroeconomic performance is highly sensitive to those shocks. In particular, when drought conditions prevail, remittances no longer exert any short-term spillover effects on growth and may increase a situation of economic dependence, by spurring agricultural imports.

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.

Using data from the World Value Survey for the period 1981–2007, this paper shows that the level of trust is positively linked to the willingness to contribute to environmental goods in selected African countries. The results are robust to possible errors in measuring trust, to the presence of various controls, and the potential endogeneity bias. These findings complement and extend the existing literature in the sense that they provide evidence on the importance of trust in improving the collective management of natural resources in Africa.

Developing countries are vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, yet there is disagreement about what they should do to protect themselves from anticipated damages. In particular, it is unclear what the optimal balance is between investments in traditional productive capital (which increases output but is vulnerable to climate change), and investments in adaptive capital (which is unproductive in the absence of climate change but ‘climate-proofs’ vulnerable capital). We develop a model of investment in adaptive and productive capital stocks, and show that while it is unlikely that the optimal strategy involves no adaptation, the scale and composition of optimal investments depends on empirical context. Application of our model to sub-Saharan Africa suggests, however, that in most contingencies it will be optimal to grow the adaptive sector more rapidly than the vulnerable sector over the coming decades, although it never exceeds 1 per cent of the economy. Our sensitivity analysis goes well beyond the existing literature in evaluating the robustness of this finding.

The provision of environmental services on-farm by the improved fallow (an agroforestry technology) has largely remained empirically untested in sub-Saharan Africa. Where effects of planting trees have been used to estimate the impacts on consumption of fuel wood from public land, actual estimates of the size of fuel wood consumption changes have been lacking. Using data from a survey of 324 households in the Chongwe district of Zambia, we tested the hypothesis that households embracing improved fallows use less fuel wood from public land since the technology provides wood as a by-product. Estimates from ordered probit and matching strategies showed that the technology had a significant causal effect of reducing the consumption of fuel wood from public land. Therefore, in addition to promoting it for soil fertility improvement, the extension messages should explicitly reflect the technology's potential to provide on-farm environmental quality.

In order to significantly reduce global carbon emissions, it is necessary also to control CO2 emissions in fast growing emerging economies such as India. The question is how the Indian economy would be affected by including the country in an international climate regime. In this analysis we soft-link a global and a single-country computable general equilibrium model in order to be able to capture distributional issues as well as international repercussions. We analyze different options of transferring revenues from domestic carbon taxes and international transfers to different household types and the effects of different assumptions on exchange rates on transfer payments. Our results show (i) that welfare effects can differ significantly for different household types, which is generally ignored in analyses with global models, and (ii) that these effects are significantly influenced by international price repercussions and by accounting for transfers from international permit sales which is generally ignored in single-country models.

Lead acid batteries generate hazardous lead waste with environmental and health implications. The deposit refund system for recycling in Delhi provides a discount to consumers on purchasing new batteries and returning used batteries to retailers for recycling. The retailers determine whether batteries are recycled in an environmentally friendly or unfriendly manner by selling them to manufacturers or to unorganized scrap dealers who then sell to unregistered smelters. This study finds that the economic instrument that brings used batteries into recycling works well. Organized recycling is limited, since retailers prefer selling used batteries to the informal sector because of higher prices, lower storage costs and taxes. In addition, we consider policy instruments like a green tax on batteries with a refund when the manufacturer ensures environment-friendly recycling and fiscal incentives to organized smelters to increase production.

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.

A growing literature documents the positive impact of community management on non-timber forest conservation but not on the condition of timber forests, which require higher management intensity than do non-timber forests. Using ground-level data of the age composition of trees and the management activities of timber forests and applying a rigorous econometric technique to deal with the endogeneity of handing over forest use rights to the community, we find that a longer period of community management is associated with a higher density of pole-size trees, indicating that community management facilitates the rehabilitation of timber forests. We also find that population pressure leads to deforestation under state management but encourages forest management under community management.

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.

During the last 20 years, the mining sector in Peru has been experiencing sustained growth. Using census, administrative, nationally and regionally representative data we compare districts in the Peruvian Highlands with a recent mining development with suitable counterfactuals. We find that the new mining activities attract migration inflows, and have some positive effects over educational indicators, and that these impacts, on average, are smaller in districts with lower levels of corporate social expenditure. However, the results of this study suggest that the local potential welfare impact of the mining boom is largely untapped and corporate social responsibility has had a limited role in improving this effect.

We investigate the interaction between a developed country that imports a carbon-intensive product, such as electricity, and a transitioning economy that exports the product. Production of the good generates a transboundary externality related to climate change; if this externality is priced improperly, the application of a feed-in tariff or border tax adjustment can provide an indirect policy instrument. We analyze the application of such a measure in a stark model where the importing country cares about climate-related damages while the exporting country does not; this can be viewed as reflecting a scenario where the (developed) importing country is more concerned about climate change than is the (transitioning) exporting economy. Because climate change will occur over a long time frame, the problem is dynamic. In this modeling context, we describe the manner in which the (second-best) tariff-cum-border tax adjustment relates to the carbon stock.

If the demand for environmental goods is increasing with income, democratization shifts the decisive power from a rich autocrat to a poorer individual (decisive voter), so it should be associated with worse environmental conditions. In this paper, it is shown through a theoretical model that: (i) democratization may have mixed effects on the level of environmental quality, depending on the size of the price and income effects on the demand for environmental quality associated with a decrease in the decisive political actor's wealth; and (ii) assuming that society is composed of two classes of individuals with different levels of exposure to pollution, and assuming moreover that the decisive voter belongs to the most exposed class of individuals while the autocrat does not, democratization is beneficial for the environment, and the better the effect on the environment, the bigger the difference in wealth between the two decisive political actors.

This paper analyzes the effect of reducing pre-harvest burning of sugar cane on the population's respiratory health in Brazil. We collected data for the municipalities in the state of São Paulo for two different periods: 2000, before the state law requiring the gradual elimination of sugar cane area utilizing pre-burning, and 2007. We used panel models for inpatient visits due to respiratory diseases, outpatient visits for inhalation procedures and length of stay for inpatient visits due to respiratory diseases, controlling for the endogeneity between health and pollution. The results show that increasing the area of raw sugar cane harvested reduces the number of inpatient visits and does not affect the number of inhalation procedures or length of stay.