The authors develop a simple analytical framework to study the welfare-maximizing environmental standards when market entry is endogenous and firms can circumvent regulation by bribing corrupt officials. Corruption changes the tradeoff in environmental policy. Corruption leads more polluting firms to enter into the market, which requires tighter environmental regulation. However, corruption also makes trading in some environmental protection for a marginally higher market entry optimal for the government.

Improving technical efficiency in agriculture can play an important role in meeting present and future demands for agricultural products, at the same time enhancing the long-term sustainability of land and water use. This paper examines the impact of household perceptions of land tenure security on technical efficiency using detailed household-level data collected in Minle County in northwest China. The authors find that the (perceived) tenure security provided by land certificates encourages part-time farming with relatively low technical efficiency. The renting out of land by households with migrant members can only partly make up for this negative effect, because land rental markets are thin and highly fragmented. Therefore, the provision of land certificates to rural households has a negative impact on technical efficiency. For tenure security provided by the expected absence of land reallocations in the near future, on the other hand, the authors find that it reduces temporary migration and thereby contributes to higher technical efficiency.

There is ample evidence that canal systems often fail to reach their design capacity. This study argues that inefficient allocation of water within canals is one cause. This study collects precise measures of farm-level water withdrawals using flow meters in a canal in Pakistan. These data reveal that farmers near the head of the canal get more canal water than farmers near the tail, even accounting for conveyance efficiency. The results suggest that improvements in canal water management would yield efficiency gains for the canal.

The authors adopt a new approach to modeling the relationship between emissions and income using long-run per capita growth rates. This approach allows them to test multiple hypotheses about the drivers of per capita emissions in a single framework and avoid several of the econometric issues that have plagued the environmental Kuznets curve literature. They estimate models for carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions. They can reject restricted models that omit either growth or beta convergence effects. Although the term representing the environmental Kuznets effect is statistically significant for per capita carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions, the estimated income per capita turning points are out of the sample for the full data set.

Climate regulations tend to target energy-intensive sectors whose products are widely used in industrial production as intermediate inputs, and carbon abatement may be partially offset by intermediate input-led leakage. This paper aims to examine the impact of intermediate input linkages on carbon leakage both theoretically and empirically. The theoretical part develops a Harberger-type model with an input-output linkage structure, identifies four leakage effects and derives closed-form solutions for these leakage effects. Its empirical part builds a computable general equilibrium model of China's economy and introduces structural decomposition analysis to link the theoretical and empirical models. When imposing a carbon price on the electricity generation sector, our results show significant sectoral carbon leakage. Our decomposition analysis further suggests that such leakage is mainly through the production substitution effect and the multiplier effect. Our results highlight the importance of sectoral linkage when discussing the carbon leakage issue of climate policies.

This paper explores the impact of conservation agriculture (CA) on the environmental efficiency of maize farmers in Zambia, by comparing nitrogen fertilizer recovery between farms that practise CA and those using conventional farming technologies. The Nitrogen Index Tier Zero tool is employed in generating a nitrogen balance sheet at the farm level. As CA technology may improve farmers' access to better technology, we employ a selectivity-corrected meta-frontier approach to account for potential selection bias and technology heterogeneity. The empirical results suggest that farmers practising CA are environmentally more efficient than conventional farmers. The findings also show that environmental efficiency is significantly influenced by access to credit, farming experience and years of schooling of household head, land ownership and distance to markets. Moreover, farmers practising CA are found to be technically more efficient than those using the conventional technology.

Hurricanes act as large external shocks potentially causing considerable damage to agriculture in the Caribbean. While a number of studies have estimated their historic economic impact, arguably the wider community and policy makers are more concerned about their future risk and potential losses, since this type of information is useful for disaster preparedness and mitigation strategy and policy. This paper implements a new approach to undertaking a quantitative wind risk and loss assessment of agriculture in Caribbean island economies. The authors construct an expected loss function that uses synthetically generated, and historical, hurricane tracks within a wind field model that takes cropland exposure derived from satellite data into consideration. The results indicate that expected wind losses are potentially large but vary considerably across the region, where the smaller islands are considerably more likely to be negatively impacted. Moreover, we find that the structure of the agricultural sector can be important in terms of vulnerability.

In this study, the author estimates the demand for improvements in the site quality of Hussain Sagar, a large lake in metropolitan Hyderabad, India. Using both revealed and stated preference approaches, it is estimated that the park provides recreational benefits of US$35 per person for on-site respondents and US$14 for off-site respondents per visit to the park. Given that over one million people visit the lake and its parks every year, based on different scenarios, the annual estimated amenity value of the lake ranges from INR1.76bn (US$29m) to INR3.48bn (US$58m). Thus it is recommended that park authorities double the access fee to the park from the current INR10 (US$0.16). With this increase, the government can potentially earn US$0.36–1.48m in revenues per year, which will make it possible to improve the quality of the lake and its surroundings.

Research on PES programs in agro-ecosystems is recent and limited in developing countries. The authors use a multi-method, quasi-experimental impact evaluation approach to examine direct and indirect livelihood impacts of the Equitable Payments for Watershed Services (EPWS) program piloted in the Morogoro region in Tanzania. The evaluation is based on a survey of 116 program participants and 117 non-participants, 32 semi-structured interviews and 16 focus group discussions to complement the survey data. They find that, while the EPWS program incentives resulted in direct benefits, indirect benefits such as increased crop yields, higher land values, new employment opportunities, more knowledgeable farmers, improved leadership skills as well as increased trust, expanded internal and external networks and strengthened institutions were more important. The results clearly indicate the potential of PES schemes to generate win-win outcomes in agro-ecosystems, but they also call for attention to equity in the design of PES programs implemented on agro-ecosystems.

Does gender matter in people's attitudes and cooperation in community-based natural resource management? If so, how do gender differences in conservation-related attitudes help or hinder sustaining the commons? Since biases ingrained in community norms and expectations often exclude women from decision making in co-management, it is imperative to find plausible answers to these queries in order to understand gender relations and cooperation in co-management. To this end, the authors conducted psychometric surveys and trust experiments on 196 forest-dependent households in West Bengal, India during 2009–2010. The findings suggest that, despite an overall negative perception about women's involvement in co-management, women are more conservation friendly and pro-social than men. It is also noticed that forest biomass and forest incomes as the indicators of sustainability have increased in those forest communities where women's proportional strength as decision makers is greater and people hold an overall positive conservation attitude.

We conducted a choice experiment (CE) to estimate willingness to accept (WTA) values for a planned conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme designed to increase toilet use in South Africa. The payment is made conditional on using a toilet and bringing urine to a central collection point. In a split-sample approach, a segment of respondents were given time to think (TTT) (24 hours) about their responses, while the remaining respondents had to answer immediately. We found significant differences in the choice behaviour between the subsamples. To validate the stated preferences with actual behaviour, a CCT programme was implemented afterwards. The stated WTA estimates were far below those revealed by actual behaviour for both subsamples. Contrary to our expectations, the TTT group had underestimated their actual WTA values by an even larger margin. The preferences for various attributes were nevertheless useful in informing the design of the real intervention.

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.

The authors develop a theoretical model that elucidates the relationship between the quality of governance, the composition of government spending and pollution as a by-product of the consumption process. In particular, they determine the impact of government spending that alleviates market failure such as subsidies to the poor which reduce credit market failure and environmental regulations to correct for pollution externality. It is found that a shift in government spending towards goods that alleviate market failure has countervailing effects – consumption pollution rises due to increases in income, but consumption pollution also falls due to increasing environmental regulations. Conditional on the government adopting a democratic regime, the effect through environmental regulations outweighs the effect through income leading to lower consumption pollution. The authors estimate an empirical model and find that the results support their theoretical predictions.

This paper studies the effect of carbon leakage on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) using satellite nighttime light data. It shows that nighttime lighting is an important variable for estimating carbon dioxide emissions that is superior to other existing indicators and covers all countries in the world, finding evidence of an inverted-U shaped relationship between light and, thus, greenhouse gas emissions and income, with a turning point at approximately US$50,000. However, the relationship is primarily driven by changes in the structure of international trade, implying strong carbon leakage effects. Consequently, environmental regulations that become operative in only one part of the world may fail without global coordination.

This paper aims to test the relation among militarization, CO2 emissions, economic growth and energy consumption in G7 countries from 1985 to 2015 via panel methods. Long- and short-run coefficients and the causal relationship between the variables are important for G7 countries' energy policies and strategy. Cointegration among CO2 emissions, militarization, energy consumption and economic growth was determined by using panel Johansen and panel autoregressive distributed lag (PARDL) methods. Further, the panel trivariate causality test was applied and unidirectional causalities from militarization to CO2 emissions and from energy consumption to CO2 emissions were found. The evidence of bidirectional causality between per capita GDP and militarization, between per capita GDP and energy consumption, and between energy consumption and militarization was determined. The paper recommends that environmental and energy policies must recognize the differences in the relation between militarization, energy consumption and economic growth in order to maintain sustainable economic growth in the G7 countries.