forest dependence and income distribution in a subsistence economy evidence from india abstract we examine an area of northern india where forestry acts to ameliorate the incidence of poverty and destitution though it does not otherwise contribute significantly to the reduction of income inequality the poor would be doubly disadvantaged without common property access to forest products conservation measures entailing curtailment in the right to common access pose a dilemma this issue is explored here

the ambiguous impact of inequality on local resource management abstract the impact of inequality on the ability of human groups to undertake successful collective action is investigated with special reference to overexploitation of common property resources in voluntary provision problems on the one hand inequality has an ambiguous impact on the feasibility of the efficient outcome even though better endowed agents contribute more to collective action in regulated settings on the other hand inequality tends to reduce the acceptability of available regulatory schemes and therefore to make collective action more difficult

the environment and emerging development issues development economics for the most part has failed to recognize renewable environmental resources as economic goods yet the lives of the poor in developing countries are intimately tied to the fate of their local common property resources soil fuel wood water and so on ignoring the loss of common property renewable resources via degradation centralization or privatization in calculations of net national product can mask the destruction of resources available to a country s poor behind the false appearance of a growing national economy this paper describes the difference between the problem of managing local common property resources in developing countries and the problem of protecting the global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans it outlines the calculations that would include the local commons in the national income accounting of capital assets and argues that the interests of those most dependent on the increasingly scarce local commons will be best served by placing control in their hands while the central government provides infrastructure and educational support to control the pollution of the global commons on the other hand the paper sketches a plan in which most countries would have a high incentive to participate a global allocation of limited tradable permits to discharge defined pollutants

on the trade offs of regulating multiple unpriced externalities with a single instrument evidence from biofuel policies abstract we develop an analytical and numerical model that integrates land fuel and food markets to evaluate the welfare implications of the u s renewable fuel standard rfs each dollar reduction in the external costs of oil dependency comes at the expense of additional environmental external costs of 0 53 conditional on the categories of external benefits we consider the rfs fails a benefit cost test when excluding the change in the trade balance with net costs totaling 1 4 billion in 2015 further policymakers would have to value the external costs of oil dependency at 1 05 per gallon of gasoline in order for the rfs to pass a benefit cost test which is nearly five times larger than central estimates of the oil premium

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

potential sources of productivity growth within chinese industry abstract this paper presents an approach for modeling and estimating potential sources of productivity growth within four major sectors of chinese industry the state and collective sectors and heavy and light industry the findings based upon industrial data from293 chinese counties indicate that substantial productivity gains can be achieved by transferring technology from the state to the collective sector exploiting enterprise and agglomerative scale economies and reallocating investment and labor to take advantage of large disparities between factor returns among the sectors the implications for the results of several idiosyncracies of chinese industrial prices and data are examined

recognizing progeny in the value of life abstract this note generalizes the value of life to incorporate the preferences for descendants of a dynastically altruistic decision maker it derives the value of progeny and shows how it depends on the benthamite vs millian nature of dynastic altruism

testing the external effect of household behavior the case of the demand for children this paper tests the external effect of household childbearing behavior by drawing on microfertility data from china the test is executed by regressing one woman s fertility on the average fertility of neighboring women china s unique affirmative birth control policy provides us with quasi experimental fertility variation that facilities identification we present two identification methods 1 testing the external effect from the dominant han chinese on minority women by using the fertility fine as an instrumental variable and 2 identifying the external effect using an instrumental variable that is based on the difference in differences we find that fertility has a large external effect

financial liberalisation and growth in china s economic reform this paper summarises china s financial liberalisation experience and examines the contributions of financial resources on economic growth during the post reform period financial liberalisation has resulted in the reallocation of the four sources of total investment in fixed assets state budget appropriation national bank loans self raised funds and foreign investment we find that the growth of gdp and industrial production are positively related to the growth of self raised funds and foreign investment we conclude that the use of foreign investment and funds raised by the enterprises themselves are more efficient than the government s appropriation and provision of bank loans

fertility decline as a coordination problem abstract the so called diffusion of innovation approach is often used in explanations of historical and contemporary fertility declines we investigate this issue by developing a new theoretical analysis which combines economic and sociological reasoning particular attention is devoted to the role of social networks for the selection of equilibria in situations when fertility decline constitutes a coordination problem we show that the effect of networks depends on the particular interaction among individuals and on the prevailing socioeconomic conditions information networks can only speed up a fertility transition that would also take place in the absence of social interaction while coordination networks can facilitate demographic change in societies that would otherwise be caught in a malthusian situation

evidence on the demographic transition abstract this paper finds that fertility responds to productivity differently depending on the economy s stage of development at low levels of development productivity increases will increase fertility while at the more advanced stages of development productivity increases lower fertility during the process there may be important interaction effects between productivity and education demand increases in secondary education demand generate fertility declines regardless of the stage of development

population consumption and resources ethical issues abstract this article is about the concept of optimum population and consumption even though it is primarily concerned with foundational issues the various ideas that have been discussed in the literature are tested in the context of economic models with limited resources it is argued that broadly speaking existing theories of optimum population and consumption are variants of average and what is often termed classical utilitarianism respectively both classes of theories are shown to have deficiencies in great measure because of their reliance on a defective concept of personhood it is also argued that contractual theories are of little use because potential people as opposed to future people cannot be parties to any contract a generation relative ethics is developed and is put to work in an overlapping generations model it is shown that generation relative ethics even when it is a variant of classical utilitarianism can prescribe a considerably lower population than classical utilitarianism

household inventories and marketed surplus in semisubsistence agriculture a model of semisubsistence agriculture explicitly accounting for the ability of farm households to hold inventories of staple foods is developed comparative statics analysis highlights the potential importance of wealth effects attributable to price induced changes in the value of household inventories empirical results for three groups of households in an indian village confirm that failure to account for household inventories leads to an overstatement of the responsiveness of both consumption demand and marketed surplus

targeting public investments by agro ecological zone to achieve growth and poverty alleviation goals in rural india abstract this paper shows that improved technology and rural infrastructure have made important contributions to agricultural growth and poverty reduction in india however these effects have varied widely across agro ecological zones in the past the government has devoted more resources to irrigated areas and this has led to significant production growth and poverty reduction in those areas however as investments in irrigated areas continue to increase their marginal returns diminish and it is now in many of the rainfed areas including some of lower agricultural potential where the marginal returns from additional government investments in technology and infrastructure are largest

a strategic analysis of global warming theory and some numbers we model the global warming process as a dynamic commons game in which the players are countries their actions at each date produce emissions of greenhouse gases and the state variable is the current stock of greenhouse gases the theoretical analysis is complemented by a calibration exercise the first set of results establishes theoretically and then with illustrative numbers the over emissions due to a tragedy of the commons the power of simple sanctions to lower emissions and increase welfare is then examined as is the effect of cost asymmetry finally a complete theoretical charactrization is provided for the best equilibrium and it is shown that it has a very simple structure it involves a constant emission rate through time

the impact of ethanol production on us and regional gasoline markets an update to may 2009 we update the findings of the impact of ethanol production on u s and regional gasoline markets as reported previously in du and hayes 2009 and 2011 by extending the data to december 2011 the results indicate that over the period of january 2000 to december 2011 the growth in ethanol production reduced wholesale gasoline prices by 0 29 per gallon on average across all regions the midwest region experienced the biggest negative impact of 0 45 gallon while the regions of east coast west coast and gulf coast experienced negative impacts of similar magnitudes around 0 20 gallon based on the data of 2011 only the marginal impacts on gasoline prices are found to be substantially higher given the increasing ethanol production and higher crude oil prices the average effect across all regions increases to 1 09 gallon and the regional impact ranges from 0 73 gallon in the gulf coast to 1 69 gallon in the midwest

efficiency with endogenous population growth in this paper we generalize the notion of pareto e ciency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations two di erent e ciency concepts are proposed p e ciency and a e ciency the two concepts di er in how they treat people that are not born we show how these concepts relate to the notion of pareto e ciency when fertility is

the interaction of population growth and environmental quality an important question for policy is whether holding constant per capita income and other relevant factors population pressures have a significant effect upon environmental degradation the authors examine the effect of population pressures upon deforestation in 64 developing countries in an attempt to provide relevant empirical findings data on deforestation were drawn from the food and agriculture organizations production yearbook results suggest that a relationship exists between per capita income and deforestation and that for africa rural population density shifts the relationship upward the increase in the rate of deforestation levels off as income increases the rate of growth in per capita income also has a significant negative impact upon deforestation although the magnitude of the effect is small the authors close in stressing that reducing the rate of population growth is not necessarily the best way to reduce the rate of deforestation deforestation in developing countries is really a problem of market failure since property rights are often neither defined nor enforced there is essentially no private cost of deforestation with no long term stake in the land people have no incentive to use land efficiently this situation must be addressed in conjunction with the problems of poverty and population growth

the population problem theory and evidence this study is concerned with the relationships among population growth poverty and environmental degradation with particular focus on the situation in developing countries the author rejects the concept of a general theory of fertility behavior in favor of an interpretation of these relationships which might be applicable to certain situations in the poorest parts of the indian subcontinent and sub saharan africa such situations include unacceptable risks of maternal death for poor illiterate women and a condemnation to extreme poverty in conditions of the deterioration of local resources and of the environment the author concludes that population growth rates are too high in certain specific areas and that an appropriate policy reaction to such conditions would be to try to change the options that men and women face so that their reasoned choice would be to lower their fertility

aggregation bias in the economic model of crime this paper uses county level panel data to test the appropriateness of the one size fits all reduced form regression approach commonly used when estimating the economic model of crime empirical results provide initial evidence that previous studies which restrict deterrent effects to have identical impacts across crime types may be presenting statistically biased results

the impact of ethanol production on us and regional gasoline markets abstract this study quantifies the impact of increasing ethanol production on wholesale retail gasoline prices employing pooled regional time series data from january 1995 to march 2008 we find that the growth in ethanol production kept wholesale gasoline prices 0 14 gallon lower than would otherwise have been the case the negative impact of ethanol on retail gasoline prices is found to vary considerably across regions the midwest region has the biggest impact at 0 28 gallon while the rocky mountain region had the smallest impact at 0 07 gallon the results also indicate that the ethanol induced reduction in gasoline prices comes at the expense of refiners profits we find a net welfare loss of 0 5 billion from the ethanol support policies in multiple markets

strategic choices in polygamous households theory and evidence from senegal this paper proposes a strategic framework to account for fertility choices in polygamous households a theoretical model specifies the main drivers of fertility in the african context and describes how the fertility of one wife might impact the behavior of her co wives it generates predictions to test for strategic interactions exploiting original data from a household survey and the demographic and health surveys in senegal empirical tests show that children are strategic complements one wife raises her fertility in response to an increase by the other wife because children are the best claim to resources controlled by the husband this result is the first quantitative evidence of a reproductive rivalry between co wives it suggests that the sustained high level of fertility in africa does not merely reect women s lack of control over births as is often argued but also their incentives to have many children this paper also contributes to the literature on household behavior as one of the few attempts to open the black box of non nuclear families

intra generational equity and sustainable welfare a time series analysis for the uk and sweden this paper discusses the importance of intra generational equity to sustainable development it outlines a number of methodologies for measuring income inequality in the economy and presents several possible ways of incorporating the impact of distributional effects into measures of welfare in the economy the authors highlight in particular an index developed by atkinson atkinson a b 1970 distributive politics and economic growth q j econ may 465 490 based on the social welfare model this method possesses two main advantages over other methods firstly it is expressed directly in terms of social well being secondly value judgements incorporated into the measure are made explicit through the parameter o which expresses society s degree of aversion to income inequality the paper calculates the value of the atkinson index for two case study countries sweden and the uk between 1950 and 1996 for a central estimate of o0 8 the results show that the welfare loss due to inequalities in the distribution of income varied between 5 and 10 for sweden and between 6 and 14 for the uk with the higher values coming towards the end of the period the paper explores the sensitivity of these results to changes in the value of o for the case of the uk and discusses the relevance of the work to the measurement of sustainable welfare 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

poverty and environmental degradation a review and analysis of the nexus abstract there is much controversy surrounding the poverty environmental degradation nexus the predominant school of thought argues that poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation and if policy makers want to address environmental issues then they must first address the poverty problem another school of thought argues that a direct link between poverty and environmental degradation is too simplistic and the nexus is governed by a complex web of factors in this paper a formal structure for analyzing the complex web of factors is formulated and used to review the existing literature on the links between poverty and the degradation of four natural resource sectors the analysis highlights the important role institutional and market failure in encouraging agents from various income groups to exhibit unsustainable activities which in turn forces some of the agents to fall into poverty another important factor is the role of conflicts between different agents income groups in the povertyenvironmental degradation nexus the analysis also highlights the presence of feedback loops between environmental degradation and poverty

growth efficiency and convergence in china s state and collective industry in china as in the soviet union and eastern europe economic reform initiatives seek to increase productivity by introducing elements of market oriented policies and institutions into an economy formerly dominated by state planning efforts to evaluate the impact of reform of chinese industry have focused on the measurement of productivity change in state enterprises this study expands the prior framework of analysis in several directions our investigation of productivity trends is not limited to state enterprises but includes quantitative comparisons with china s fast growing collective industries which contributed 36 of overall industrial output in 1988 1 unlike previous studies our analysis works with gross rather than net output this permits us to investigate changes in the productivity of intermediate inputs which occupy a large portion of total costs in chinese industry as well as labor and capital to do this we develop a quasi frontier estimation procedure which seems appropriate for comparisons of total factor productivity based on chinese industrial data finally we offer a quantitative perspective on the extent to which reform efforts have moved industrial resource allocation toward patterns expected of a market system the analysis confirms our previous finding based on a restricted framework employing only labor fixed capital and net output that multifactor productivity in state industry has risen substantially during

malthus in the light of climate change abstract to reconsider the malthusian predictions of natural limits to economic development the paper develops a multi sector growth model with exhaustible resource extraction investments in physical and knowledge capital climate change and endogenous fertility economic growth is driven by endogenous innovations which increase in the availability and productivity of research labour poor substitution of natural resources triggers sectoral change climate change is the result of polluting resource use which is like consumption and investments based on the intertemporal optimization of the households highlighting the importance of bounded resource supply and of rational extraction decisions i show that climate change is independent of population growth in steady state and there is no causal relationship between climate and population during transition to steady state the consumption per capita growth rate rises in the innovation rate and the output elasticities of labour and capital in the different sectors unlike climate policy population policy is not warranted it may be counterproductive because labour is crucial for the research sector

the environmental impact of poverty evidence from firewood collection in rural nepal abstract we investigate determinants of household firewood collection in rural nepal using 1995 96 and 2002 3 world bank living standards measurement survey lsms data we incorporate village fixed effects endogenous censoring measurement error in living standards and heterogeneous effects of different household assets we find no evidence in favor of the poverty environment hypothesis the evidence for the environmental kuznets curve depends on the precise measure of living standards and time period studied firewood collections fall with a transition to modern occupations and rise with increasing population and household division the local interhousehold collection externality is negligible indicating that policy interventions are justified only by ecological considerations or nonlocal spillovers

the economics of poverty in poor countries this paper which examines recently studied links between 1 poverty high fertility and undernourishment and 2 environmental degradation and civic disconnection in developing countries opens by reviewing the limitations of orthodox discussions of economic institutions and property rights and the orthodox dichotomy that has located the cause of poverty in the suppression of markets the introduction also notes that much of the analysis in this paper is based on data from sub saharan africa and india the next section of the paper summarizes evidence on the magnitude and extent of world poverty section 3 exposes the connection between undernourishment and a persons capacity to work as one of the pathways to the poverty trap sections 4 and 5 consider the dependence of impoverished rural populations on common property resources and how the conventional process of economic growth can break down this system and make certain sections of the population especially vulnerable to economic shocks the next two sections explore the possibility that links between poverty high fertility and environmental degradation may constitute another pathway to the poverty trap the eighth section reviews the methodology of using net national product which includes resource depletion and environmental deterioration as an evaluation criterion and argues that mainstream development economists may have neglected environmental and population problems because they have been relying on the wrong economic indices the final section concludes that a number of policies must be used to improve options for people

poverty income distribution and policy making this paper deals with the key distributional issues arising from the regulation of the environment and the management of natural resources the paper is divided into a section dealing with poverty and a section dealing with broader income distribution effects although there is much discussion of the linkages of poverty to environmental degradation empirical studies establishing these linkages are few the relationship is critically dependent on the institutional structures in the countries concerned and how they respond to changing environmental pressures on the broader distributional impacts the papers focusses on the analysis of ganiers and losers from environmental regulations the analysis is complex because the direct incidence is not the same as the final incidence much of the work has looked only at the former in addition the political economy of regulation needs to pay greater attention to impacts on key and vulnerable groups more so than can be done by looking at broad income bands

reproductive externalities and fertility behaviour abstract this article studies reproductive externalities within rural communities in poor countries it is shown that such externalities create a link between household poverty household size and the local natural resource base each of which is viewed as being endogenous the models presented here offer an explanation for the fact that in recent decades large groups of people in various parts of the world have been unable to lift themselves out of acute poverty even while their national economies have on average enjoyed economic growth implications for policy and institutional changes are drawn

beyond the quantity quality tradeoff population control policy and human capital investment abstract the quantity quality tradeoff theory implies that a reduction in fertility would induce more human capital investment per child and it is widely believed that population control policy could promote human capital levels in developing countries china s one child policy ocp has significantly reduced the fertility in the country and popular belief holds that this policy has contributed to the enhancement in china s human capital since 1979 however the quantity quality tradeoff dose not present the complete truth another crucial factor relates to which segment of the population is reduced a critical issue that has been ignored in the literature china s ocp is significantly more strictly implemented in urban areas than in rural areas where human capital investment in children is significantly lower this two tier ocp could have significantly increased the rural urban fertility ratio and brought about important consequences we first emphasize the importance of such a population compositional effect which may offset the potentially positive quantity quality tradeoff effect on human capital we present a simple analytic framework and quantify the relative sizes of the quantity quality tradeoff and compositional effects we find that the former is dominated by the latter and that the ocp has reduced the average human capital level of china s next generation by approximately 1 2 this novel evidence indicates that the conventional wisdom on population control may be incomplete and that its policy implications could be misleading

old age pensions and fertility in rural areas of less developed countries some evidence from mexico this paper reviews the theoretical relationship between old age pensions and human fertility and offers preliminary evidence from mexico on the direction and magnitude of the effect on fertility of the introduction of a formal old age pension system the security motive is an untested but plausible hypothesis especially for rural areas where alternative methods for caring for the elderly if they exist are likely to be relatively risky and unprofitable a number of different effects can theoretically be expected following introduction of a system of old age pensions in such areas including a savings reduction effect and life cycle effects such as effects on the time phasing of labor force participation and of consumption and effects on family fragmentation and intergenerational transfers and on the sex composition of the labor force and the allocation of family resources between the sexes information costs uncertainties about various aspects of the social security system and the possibility of differences between desired and actual fertility must also be considered given the long list of possible effects and offsetting influences and uncertainties about the magnitudes of such effects the actual outcome can only be resolved empirically data on sugar cane workers who began to be covered by a social security system in 1963 in 34 contiguous rural municipalities in the papaloapan river basin in southeastern mexico were used to test the relationship a regression analysis of the determinants of change in the child woman ratios in the 34 municipalities from 1960 70 indicated among other findings that the proxy used for the influence of participation in an old age pension system had a significantly negative effect on fertility an increase in social security participation from 0 to 50 would appear to reduce the child woman ratio by more than 1 10 despite the simplicity of the testing procedure shortcomings in the available data and the possibility of specification bias the results indicate that the security motive may be important and requires further empirical and theoretical research

how market efficiency and the theory of storage link corn and ethanol markets this article uses the theories of market efficiency and supply of storage to develop a conceptual link between the corn and ethanol markets and explores statistical evidence for the link we propose that a long run no profit condition is established in distant futures markets for ethanol corn and natural gas and then use the theory of storage to define an inter temporal equilibrium among these prices the relationship shows that under certain conditions future price expectations will influence nearby futures prices and that a short term relationship between input and output prices will exist we demonstrate validity of the theory using a structural price model and then by means of time series techniques

how trade saved humanity from biological exclusion an economic theory of neanderthal extinction abstract one of the great puzzles in science concerns the rise of early modern humans and the fall of neanderthals a number of theories exist and many support the biological principle of competitive exclusion but the evidence for such mechanistic theories in which biology is destiny is limited in response this paper develops a behavioral model of neanderthal extinction we show how the endogenous division of labor and subsequent trading among early modern humans could have helped them to overcome potential biological deficiencies we discuss the relation between economics and natural selection and show how trade may partially offset natural selection

economic growth and the rise of forests although forests have diminished globally over the past 400 years forest cover has increased in some areas including india in the last two decades aggregate time series evidence on forest growth rates and income growth across countries and within india and a newly assembled data set that combines national household survey data census data and satellite images of land use in rural india at the village level over a 29 year period are used to explore the hypothesis that increases in the demand for forest products associated with income and population growth lead to forest growth the evidence is consistent with this hypothesis which also shows that neither the expansion of agricultural productivity nor rising wages in india increased local forest cover

organizing contests for status the matthew effect vs the mark effect what is the best way to design tournaments for status in which individuals labor primarily for the esteem of their peers what process in other words should organizers of status based contests impose upon those who covet peer recognition we propose a formal model of status based competition that contrasts two competing alternatives the first following merton is the matthew effect according to which a tournament s architect directs slack resources to elite actors and thus widens the distribution of rewards by favoring cumulative advantage the second is the mark effect under which a tournament s designer instead pushes slack resources to marginal actors and thus tightens the distribution of rewards our results suggest that although the mark effect is better for the social welfare of most tournaments the matthew effect is preferable in two distinct contexts in small tournaments where variation in underlying ability translates into acute advantages for the most capable contestants and in large tournaments whose contestants face constant rather than rising marginal costs a condition we relate to contestants perception of their work as intrinsically valuable our contributions are twofold we find counter to the thrust of merton s work that cumulative advantage is not invariably optimal for the functioning of status contests and we identify circumstances in which the production of superstars is likely to make contests for status better off in aggregate implications for future research on status and management are discussed this paper was accepted by olav sorenson organizations and social networks

income and the environment in rural india is there a poverty trap we study the relationships between rural income distributions and changes in environmental conditions in southern western and central india between 1994 95 and 2000 01 other than the relatively rich we find that all income strata benefit from an improved environment and intermediate expenditure households benefit more than the very poor in absolute terms higher median consumption expenditures and richness are estimated to increase environmental decline but we do not find a significant impact of income poverty on local environmental health the results do not support the poverty trap conjecture with environmental degradation driving expenditure reductions that promote offsetting aforestation which benefits the poor

population and the environment a parable of firewood and other tales the author analyzes the relationship between population and the environment with a focus on the role which environmental degradation and natural resources depletion may play in producing the population pressure which lies behind such degradation and depletion especially in developing countries the principal conclusion of this analysis is that the possibilities for a stable equilibrium between human population and its environment are quite limited i show that parental altruism toward their children can only make matters worse if socially unchecked by leading to an increase of the birthrate in every environmental state in comparison with that which would occur in its absence excerpt

nonlinearities and heterogeneity in environmental quality an empirical analysis of deforestation we use a panel data set of 59 developing countries over the 1972 1994 period to study the deforestation process relying on both parametric and semiparametric models we examine nonlinearities and heterogeneity in the deforestation process we first study the existence of an environmental kuznets curve ekc and then analyze determinants of deforestation our data sample provides no evidence of an ekc we also find that political institution failures may worsen the deforestation process in developing countries

pro poor growth and sustainable development framework evidence from two step gmm estimator abstract the environmental sustainability agenda is not easy to be achieved without implementing pro growth and pro poor growth policies across the globe pakistan s economy is no exception that strive hard to managed environmental resource capital and pro poor growth expenditures in order to reduce poverty incidence and carbon mitigation policies while many efforts need more sustainable instruments to be achieved united nation s assigned sustainable development target till 2030 the study selected an annual time series data from 1975 to 2016 and employed two step generalized method of moments gmm estimator for robust inferences the results show that higher economic growth decreases poverty incidence through social reforms while deforestation under 5 mortality rate trade openness carbon emissions and fdi inflows largely increases poverty incidence in a country the study confirmed environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis of carbon emissions in relation of per capita income and public spending on education while pollution haven hypothesis is confirmed due to high involvement of dirty polluting industries in country s economic transformation process the fossil fuel combustion and high population density increases carbon emissions that sabotage the process of sustainable development in a country thus it is imperative to device sustainable policies for mitigating carbon fossil emissions with cleaner production techniques and improves the quality of life of poor people through increase social expenditures that trickle down to the poor as compared to the non poor

social norms fertility and economic development abstract this paper presents an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and human capital accumulation within such a framework it shows how the presence of family size norms can lead to multiple equilibria it can thus potentially explain different development patterns without recourse to increasing returns and differences in initial conditions furthermore it derives sufficient conditions under which different equilibria can be pareto ranked finally it shows that the main results hold also in the case where there exists parental altruism

population growth and natural resource scarcity long run development under seemingly unfavorable conditions in this paper i consider an economy that is constrained by the use of natural resources and driven by knowledge accumulation resources are essential inputs in all sectors i show that population growth and poor input substitution are not detrimental but on the contrary are even necessary to obtain a sustainable consumption level i find a general rule to define the conditions for a constant innovation rate the rule does not apply to capital but to labor growth which is the crucial input in research furthermore the rule relates to the sectoral structure of the economy and to demographic transition the results continue to hold with a backstop technology and are extended for the case of minimum resource constraints

poverty and resource dependence in rural india abstract previous studies of rural households in developing countries have tended to find that the dependence of these households on common pool resources declines with income our study of households in jhabua india finds a more complex relationship using the share of resource income in total long run or permanent income as our dependence measure which we argue is more appropriate than the short run income based measure commonly used in the literature we find that for households that collect any resources at all dependence exhibits a u shaped relationship with income that is the poorest and richest households depend more on resources than households with intermediate incomes the poorest and richest households are also found to be least likely to collect however indicating that resource use at the income extremes is bimodal either zero or above average moreover the observed trends for resources as a whole are not mirrored in those for individual resources dependence on fuelwood and dung declines with income for example while dependence on fodder and construction wood increases these findings suggest that common pool resources are a productive source of income not just for the poor but also for the rich and that improvements in the stocks of these resources can potentially form the basis of poverty reduction efforts in these economies

banking sector and restructuring in eastern europe abstract the paper seeks to achieve a number of objectives first to analyze the underlying causes of east european commercial banks illiquidity problems second to examine the case for public versus private informal approaches to bankruptcy and bank restructurings as general approaches to these problems third to evaluate the different models of restructuring banks in particular eight alternative models are identified fourth to briefly describe the models that have been chosen by a number of east european countries finally to layout the criteria for policymakers choice of a particular restructuring model

empirical regularities in the poverty environment relationship of rural households evidence from zimbabwe abstract analysis of rural households and environmental resources is beset by inadequate data especially in africa using purpose collected panel data from zimbabwe we demonstrate seven empirical regularities in the rural poverty environment relationship most important environmental resources make a significant contribution to average rural incomes poorer households also depend heavily on these resources which contribute c 40 to their incomes richer households however use greater quantities of environmental resources in total finally considerable differentiation exists in the economic characteristics of environmental goods these results demonstrate the considerable economic significance of environmental resources to rural households surveys which ignore them miscalculate rural incomes and welfare

birth rates and border crossings latin american migration to the us canada spain and the uk we use census data for the us canada spain and uk to estimate bilateral migration rates to these countries from 25 latin american and caribbean nations over the period 1980 to 2005 latin american migration to the us is responsive to labor supply shocks as predicted by earlier changes in birth cohort sizes and labor demand shocks associated with balance of payments crises and natural disasters latin american migration to canada spain and the uk in contrast is largely insensitive to these shocks responding only to civil and military conflict the results are consistent with us immigration policy toward latin america which is relatively permissive toward illegal entry being mediated by market forces and immigration policy in the other countries which favor skilled workers and asylum seekers among other groups insulating them from labor market shocks in the region