This paper estimates the cost of a policy to restrict water trades to mining firms in northern Chile in order to protect riparian ecosystems and indigenous agriculture. In response to the policy, mining firms have developed high-cost desalination and pumping facilities to secure adequate water supplies. We develop a methodology and estimate the cost of market transactions that fail to occur due to the policy. Lost trade surplus is estimated at US$52 million per year. Without trade restrictions, around 86 per cent of the remaining agricultural water in the region would be transferred to mining.

In wealth accounting and sustainability assessments, we characterize the non-declining wealth criterion under dynamic average utilitarianism (DAU) as defined by Dasgupta (2001). Under DAU, the objective function consists of total intergenerational well-being divided by the present discounted sum of population from the present to the future. It is shown that, in order for an economy to be on a sustainable path, inclusive wealth should grow at a rate higher than the difference between the discount rate and the share of current population of the discounted future population. Our application to the inclusive wealth index shows that, among other results, the DAU criterion changes sustainability assessments for some developing countries with future demographic change, implying that wealth does not accumulate sufficiently in light of DAU. We also show empirical estimates of the value of population change under total utilitarianism, average utilitarianism, and DAU.

This paper examines the impact of changes in agricultural land use on deforestation at the local level in the Tapajós Basin in the Brazilian Amazon. It uses exogenous variation in crop-to-beef relative prices to investigate the effects of pasture-to-cropland conversion on deforestation. The findings indicate that increases in crop-to-beef relative prices increase the rate of pasture-to-cropland conversion and reduce the rate of deforestation. The magnitude of the effects implies that land conversion reduced deforestation at the local level by 5,300 square kilometers from 2002 to 2012. This reduction is the equivalent of almost 15 per cent of the total deforestation observed in the region during this period. These results are consistent with a land use model in which cattle ranching and crop cultivation have different input-intensities and there is imperfect mobility of productive factors between municipalities. This model highlights the fact that changes in relative prices affect deforestation through its effect on input prices.

Identifying a demand function for air quality is a key input to calculate welfare measurements of pollution abatement policies. We defined intra-urban housing submarkets to apply a Second Stage hedonic pricing model that allowed us to identify an inverse demand function for PM10 reductions in Bogotá. The monthly benefits of compliance with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard (50 μg/m3 – annual average), and the far more stringent World Health Organization standard (20 μg/m3 – annual average) are valued at US$12.16 and US$189.64 per household, respectively. These values, in turn, represent about 1.35 per cent and 21.04 per cent of the average household income. The hedonic model applied hereby shows that intra-urban housing submarkets are suitable for the identification of a demand function to be used by policy makers interested in evaluating non-marginal benefits (costs) from air quality improvements (deterioration).

This special issue contributes to the natural resource economics literature by shining a light on the specific challenges and opportunities faced by developing countries that have recently become dependent on natural resources or are particularly exposed to climate change. It is composed of five studies on countries from all regions of the developing world, involving a variety of natural resources and policy issues. Four of the five studies illustrate how computable general equilibrium models are particularly well-suited, despite their relatively limited past use, to the analysis of natural resources. All five studies are led by researchers based in these countries, providing unique insights into the specific local context. The studies underscore the extreme vulnerability that the introduction of significant natural resource revenues and climate change can create in developing countries. They also show how the choice of appropriate policies to avoid the resource curse varies according to country-specific economic conditions.

Because their assets and income represent such a small share of national wealth, the impacts of climate change on poor people, even if dramatic, will be largely invisible in aggregate economic statistics such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Assessing and managing future impacts of climate change on poverty requires different metrics, and specific studies focusing on the vulnerability of poor people. This special issue provides a set of such studies, looking at the exposure and vulnerability of people living in poverty to shocks and stressors that are expected to increase in frequency or intensity due to climate change, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and impacts on agricultural production and ecosystem services. This introduction summarizes their approach and findings, which support the idea that the link between poverty and climate vulnerability goes both ways: poverty is one major driver of people's vulnerability to climate-related shocks and stressors, and this vulnerability is keeping people in poverty. The paper concludes by identifying priorities for future research.

Our spatial analysis indicates that in 2000 over one third of the rural population in developing countries was located on less favored agricultural land and areas, which are constrained by biophysical conditions or poor market access. We examine whether these spatial distributions of rural population in 2000 influence subsequent changes in the rate of poverty from 2000 to 2012 in 83 developing countries. We find no evidence of a direct impact on changes in poverty, but there is a significant indirect impact via the elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to growth. If climate change leads to more people concentrated in these areas, or an increase in unfavorable agricultural regions, then the poverty-reducing impact of overall per capita income growth could be further weakened. Reducing poverty will require targeting rural populations in less favored lands and remote areas and encouraging out-migration.

Deforestation results from the trade-off between benefits from forest conservation and economic profits associated with land development. However, as net gains are often uncertain, irreversible land development may later be regretted. To better inform conservation policies, we use a real options framework to model irreversible forest conversion under uncertain conservation benefits and determine the associated optimal long-run average rate of deforestation. We then analyze the impact of the demand for agricultural products on the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. In a scenario analysis for the nine states of the Brazilian Amazon, we calculate: (i) the expected time for exhaustion of the current forest stock; and (ii) the potential forest coverage for the next 20, 100 and 200 years. Our results suggest that if forest benefits grow over time at a sufficiently high speed, they may significantly slow down deforestation. In contrast, the higher their volatility, the faster deforestation proceeds.

We study the social discount rate, taking into account inequality within generations, that is, across countries or individuals. We show that if inequality decreases over time, the social discount rate should be lower than the one obtained by the standard Ramsey rule under certain but reasonable conditions. Applied to the global discount rate and due to the projected convergence across countries, this implies that the inequality adjusted discount rate should be about twice as high as the standard Ramsey rule predicts. For individual countries on the other hand, where inequality tends to increase over time, the effect goes in the other direction. For the United States for instance, this inequality effect leads to a reduction of the social discount rate by about 0.5 to 1 percentage points. We also present an analytical formula for the social discount rate allowing us to disentangle inequality, risk, and intertemporal fluctuation aversion.

Understanding the extent to which agriculture can adapt to climate change and the determinants of farmers' adaptive capacity are of paramount importance from a policy perspective. Based on household survey data from a large sample in rural China, the present article adopts a panel approach to estimate the potential benefits of long-run adaptation and to identify the determinants of farmers' adaptive capacity. The empirical results suggest that, for various model settings and climate change scenarios, long-run adaptations should mitigate one-third to one-half of the damages of warming on crop profits by the end of this century. These findings support the basic argument of the hedonic approach that omitting long-run adaptations will dramatically overestimate the potential damage of climate change. The paper also finds that household-level capital intensity and farmland size have significant effects on farmers' adaptive capacities.

The economy of Mongolia, a country rich in natural resources, is increasingly dependent upon the mining sector. International prices of mining commodities have been highly volatile in recent years. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to examine the short-term effects on the Mongolian economy of two scenarios: (1) a moderate boom in the coal market; and (2) a drop in the world price of metal ores. It is found that the Dutch disease effect generated by the shocks is insignificant given the structure of the economy (e.g., small export shares and low export intensity of manufacturing and agriculture commodities) and a labor market condition with high unemployment. Since the economy is largely dependent upon on the mining sector, the impacts of the shocks are jarring, implying that the government must abide by its fiscal rules for stable growth and prosperity.

This article investigates the use of payments for environmental services to support a wildlife corridor between two Priority Tiger Conservation Landscapes in central Sumatra, Indonesia. Several hundred smallholders operate within a Protection Forest linking the Tiger Conservation Landscapes. This study explores the willingness of these smallholders to accept a payment requiring them to forgo access to their land for five years. In addition to asking households directly what they would be willing to accept (WTA), we also ask them to infer what their neighbour would accept. The study finds evidence of hypothetical bias in the conventional WTA values, with a statistically significant difference between what people say they would be willing to accept when surveyed, compared to what they say would actually be willing to accept in a ‘real life’ situation. We show how inferred valuation techniques can mitigate against this.

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.

We analyze links between exposure to climate extremes and shocks, vulnerability and coping strategies, environmental reliance and poverty among 7,300 households in forest adjacent communities in 24 developing countries. We combine observed income with predicted income to create four categories of households: income & asset poor (structurally poor), income rich & asset poor (stochastically non-poor), income poor & asset rich (stochastically poor) and income & asset rich (structurally non-poor), and assess exposure and vulnerability across these groups. The income poor are more exposed to extreme climate conditions. They tend to live in dryer (and hotter) villages in the dry forest zones, in wetter villages in the wet zones, and experience larger rainfall fluctuations. Among the income-generating coping strategies, extracting more environmental resources ranks second to seeking wage labor. The poorest in dry regions also experience the highest forest loss, undermining the opportunities to cope with future climate shocks.

Sense of ownership is often advocated as an argument for local participation within the epistemic development and nature conservation communities. Stakeholder participation in initiating, designing or implementing institutions is claimed to establish a sense of ownership among the stakeholders and subsequently improve the intended outcomes of the given institution. Theoretical and empirical justifications of the hypothesis remain scarce. A better understanding of the effects of local participation can motivate more extensive and stronger participation of local stakeholders and improve institutional performance. This paper applies theories from psychology and behavioral economics to sense of ownership. The empirical investigation is a framed field experiment in the context of tropical forest conservation and payments for environmental services in Tanzania. The results lend little support to the hypothesis in this context. The participation treatment in the experiment is weak, and a possible explanation is that sense of ownership is sensitive to the participation form.

Fuelwood scarcity creates a widespread environmental problem that places a major burden on women and children in the rural areas of developing countries. Consequently, many governments, donors and non-governmental organizations have encouraged on-farm fuelwood production and agroforestry practices. Whether, however, fuelwood from different sources can be easily substituted is an important empirical question as the degree of substitutability can depend on local markets and households' resource endowments and incomes. In this paper, we examine the substitution between three fuelwood sources among rural households in western Kenya: fuelwood collected off-farm, fuelwood produced on-farm, and that which is purchased. Using household-specific shadow prices for fuelwood and male and female wages, we find that strict gender divisions in household labor result in limited substitution between fuelwood sources. Among the implications are that programs and policies promoting agroforestry will have limited success without first addressing the structural differences in labor markets.

This study examines the relationship between groundwater irrigation and off-farm employment with a set of household level data collected in North China. The results provide evidence that off-farm employment reduces both time spent on irrigation in terms of total hours of irrigation and the amount of groundwater pumped. However, these effects have not resulted in losses of crop production. In fact, water productivity measured as output value produced per m3 of groundwater pumped is higher among households with off-farm employment. These seemingly contradictory findings are explained by the increased use of water-saving technologies such as furrow irrigation, underground pipes and/or lined canals. These technologies reduce seepage losses during the conveyance of groundwater as well as during irrigation of the fields. As a result, less groundwater needs to be pumped to achieve the same level of groundwater irrigation application rate in the field.

Since 2007, Burkina Faso's mining sector has grown quickly, with gold replacing cotton as the country's biggest export. The decline in gold prices since 2012, however, has hit the Burkina Faso economy hard. Using a static computable general equilibrium model, we assess whether – in a context of gold-price decline and volatility – an increase in the tax burden on the mining sector, as implemented by the government of Burkina Faso, is the appropriate way to avoid the natural resource curse. The results show that a tax policy based solely on increasing taxes on the gold sector brings only limited economic benefits, notably in terms of employment, and fails to significantly mitigate the effects of gold-price volatility.

The effectiveness of adaptation strategies is crucial for reducing the costs of climate change. Using plot-level data from a specifically designed survey conducted in Pakistan, we investigate the productive benefits for farmers who adapt to climate change. The impact of implementing on-farm adaptation strategies is estimated separately for two staple crops: wheat and rice. We employ propensity score matching and endogenous switching regressions to account for the possibility that farmers self-select into adaptation. Estimated productivity gains are positive and significant for rice farmers who adapted, but negligible for wheat. Counterfactual gains for non-adapters were significantly positive, which is potentially a sign of transactions costs to adaptation. Other factors associated with adaptation were formal credit and extension, underscoring the importance of addressing institutional and informational constraints that inhibit farmers from improving their farming practices. The findings provide evidence for the Pakistani Planning and Development Department's ongoing assessment of climate-related agricultural losses.

Rural households in developing countries depend on crops, forest extraction and other income sources for their livelihoods, but these livelihood contributions are sensitive to climate change. Combining socioeconomic data from about 8,000 smallholder households across the tropics with gridded precipitation and temperature data, we find that households have the highest crop income at 21°C temperature and 2,000 mm precipitation. Forest incomes increase on both sides of this agricultural maximum. We further find indications that crop income declines in response to weather shocks while forest income increases, suggesting that households may cope by reallocating inputs from agriculture to forests. Forest production may thus be less sensitive than crop production to climatic fluctuations, gaining comparative advantage in extreme climates and under weather anomalies. This suggests that well-managed forests might help poor rural households to cope with and adapt to future climate change.