wheat from chaff meta analysis as quantitative literature review abstract this paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research meta regression analysis or mra economics is theory driven yet we must learn empirically if economics is to advance mra offers a more objective statistical method to summarize our empirical knowledge and to explain the wide study to study variation in economic research mra is used to assess the evidence for ricardian equivalence and its findings are contrasted to those of conventional narrative review furthermore mra establishes a platform from which to distinguish genuine empirical effect from the exploitable specification error that infests applied econometrics

the impact of rural electric access on deforestation rates summary overpopulation and economic industrialization are two common explanations for deforestation political ecology however highlights that good governance and effective land management at the local level can offset the impact of population growth and development on environmental degradation in this paper we provide an innovative argument derived from political ecology to explain deforestation but rather than pursing a bottom up approach to governance we take a top down approach we argue that the state can ease deforestation rates by weaning rural populations off of the consumption of biomass for their energy needs by expanding rural electrification access using a panel analysis of 158 countries for the years 1990 2000 and 2010 we find that not only does rural electrification cause deforestation rates to decrease but also that it is more robust in explaining deforestation than population growth or development our study provides two innovations to political ecology it highlights that the state can help rather than hinder local populations with managing their local environments in a more sustainable way by providing them with public goods based energy alternatives and it supplements political ecology s qualitative focus on environmental degradation with a generalized quantitative analysis of state based initiatives on deforestation our results suggest that current global initiatives addressing deforestation specifically the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation redd agenda of the united nations framework convention on climate change should not only assist local land managers but also work with the state to ensure universal access to electricity

why are there serial defaulters evidence from constitutions abstract presidential democracies were 4 9 times more likely than parliamentary democracies to default on external debts between 1976 and 2000 in this article i argue that the explanation for the serial defaults by a number of sovereign borrowers lies in their constitutions ceteris paribus parliamentary democracies are less likely than presidential democracies to default on their liabilities because the confidence requirement creates a credible link between economic policies and the executive s political survival this link tends to strengthen the repayment commitment when politicians are opportunistic i show that this effect is large in the contemporary world even when the comparison is restricted to countries that are similar in terms of colonial origin geography and economic variables since a country s form of government is typically chosen at the time of independence and is highly persistent over time constitutions can explain why debt policies in developing countries are related to individual

calculating levels of protection is it always appropriate to use world reference prices based on current trading status abstract protection measures such as the nominal protection coefficient npc the effective protection coefficient epc the producer subsidy equivalent pse and the consumer subsidy equivalent cse are conventionally calculated using world reference prices based on current trading status under certain conditions the conventional approach can lead to incorrect estimation of the degree and sometimes even the direction of protection this paper spells out the conditions under which use of world reference prices based on current trading status is incorrect and presents data for wheat in pakistan to illustrate how failure to consider these conditions can lead to misleading policy recommendations

the economics of tropical deforestation and land use an introduction to the special issue this paper both introduces the special issue on the economics of tropical deforestation and land use and conducts a synthesis crosscountry analysis of tropical agricultural land expansion agricultural development is the main factor determining land expansion but institutional factors have an important influence income effects vary from region to region and do not always display an ekc relationship the case studies comprising this special issue provide further case study insights into tropical deforestation and land use through spatial analysis of locational factors cge modeling of policy scenarios assessing external market impacts on land clearing and modelling state interventions and taxation

the use and abuse of meta analysis in environmental and natural resource economics an assessment motivated by the 2006 report of a work group appointed by the environmental protection agency epa this paper examines the present state of meta analysis in environmental economics and offers recommendations for its future use to this end we summarize and assess 140 meta analyses from 125 published and unpublished studies covering 17 topical categories in environmental and resource economics first we provide several generic meta analysis models as reference points and discuss major estimation issues five econometric issues are identified as part of a complete analysis 1 sample selection criteria 2 basic data summary 3 primary data heterogeneity 4 heteroskedasticity and 5 non independence of multiple observations from primary studies second a tabular summary is presented for the 140 meta analyses with respect to estimation methods third a narrative summary is presented for 19 meta analyses including the three value of statistical life studies examined by the epa work group and one analysis from each of 16 other categories fourth we offer a set of best practice guidelines for future meta analyses in this and other areas of economics last the paper comments on the use of meta analytic methods for benefit transfers of environmental values

relationship between forest resources and economic growth empirical evidence from china abstract natural resources especially forests are critical to china s sustainable development in recent years effective utilization of forest resources has become a significant concern in china in this study on the basis of the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis the relationship between forest resources and economic growth is examined using panel data from 30 provinces in china for the period 2002 2015 and the generalized method of moments gmm approach to control for potential endogeneity the empirical results indicate that with continuous economic growth the timber output and area of afforestation would at first increase and then decrease after reaching the corresponding turning points given the considerable regional gap in economic and social development three regions of china were investigated to perform a more in depth analysis evidence observed for the country and the three regions suggests an ekc for forest resources these findings indicate positive effects of china s pursuit of a more balanced growth path where forest resources would be less consumed and more actively protected

green goals and full employment are they compatible abstract two empirical correlations are studied one between economic growth and environmental impacts and the other between the lack of economic growth and unemployment it is demonstrated that at a global level economic growth is strongly correlated with environmental impacts and barriers to fast decoupling are large and numerous on the other hand low or negative growth is highly correlated with increasing unemployment in most market economies and strategies to change this lead to difficult questions and tradeoffs the coexistence of these two correlations which have rarely been studied together in the literature on green growth degrowth and a growth justifies ambivalence about growth to make key environmental goals compatible with full employment the decoupling of environmental impacts from economic output has to be accompanied by a reduction of dependence on growth in particular strategies to tackle unemployment without the need for growth several of which are studied in this article need much more attention in research and policy

governance and deforestation a meta analysis in economics abstract understanding which aspects of forest governance have the potential to effectively reduce deforestation is central to reversing trends in global deforestation there is a multitude of empirical studies examining this relationship using various measures of governance and study designs coming to diverse conclusions in order to identify the source of variation across studies this article conducts a meta analysis of 32 empirical cross country studies in the field of economics containing 227 estimates of the impact of different governance measures on deforestation using an ordered probit model we find that the choice of the governance measure is the main factor in explaining variations in the outcomes of the studies in particular studies using environmental policy ownership rights presence of environmental ngos and rule of law as measures of governance are more likely to find that better governance reduces deforestation in contrast studies using democracy and rights as a measure of governance are more likely to find that deforestation increases when governance is improved the finding that not all aspects of governance improvements are equally supportive of forest conservation suggests that more nuanced analyses of specific aspects of environmental governance are required to guide evidence based policy making

effect of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency a meta analysis of empirical results abstractinvestigating the impact of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency is becoming a critical issue in applied agricultural policy analysis this article presents a meta analysis of empirical results on this issue based on data gathered from a systematic literature review we find that in the empirical literature subsidies are commonly negatively associated with farm technical efficiency meta regression estimation results show that the direction significantly negative significantly positive or non significant of the observed effects is sensitive to the way subsidies are modelled in the empirical studies

food marketing and pricing policy in eastern and southern africa a survey abstract this article surveys the empirical record of grain marketing and pricing policy in eastern and southern africa over 1930 1995 the paper addresses five key issues with major implications for food policy throughout africa a why the anticipated supply response to market liberalization has not yet occurred b why the common assumption of state taxation of farmers to support a cheap food policy does not apply in most of the countries in the region c why the temporary successes of the state led approach to stimulating smallholder grain production were unsustainable d why the elimination of government food subsidies associated with market reform has not adversely affected consumers and e why the fiscal cost of the marketing systems at least initially worsened rather than improved after the reforms were implemented in most countries the key future challenges for marketing policy are how to develop coordinated and financially sustainable input finance and commodity marketing systems for raising productivity growth in smallholder agriculture while overcoming inherited agricultural dualism and how to mitigate the effects of food price instability in a cost effective manner

an empirical analysis of forest transition and land use change in developing countries abstract deforestation is a major environmental issue in developing countries and agricultural land expansion is its main cause the objective of this paper is twofold 1 to identify the macroeconomic determinants of ending deforestation and 2 to explain cumulative deforestation and other land uses to do this we first study the probability of a turning point for deforestation i e the switch from decreasing to expanding forest areas based on the forest transition hypothesis second we adapt a land use model to explain the trade off between forest and agriculture during development to take the link between both phenomena into account we estimate a dynamic panel seemingly unrelated regression sur model along with a switching regression model applied to a dataset of 57 developing countries observed over four time periods the estimation results reveal that economic development and institutions play a significant role in long term deforestation our results also suggest that after the first development stage agriculture and forest are not always competing land uses these results provide new insights into public policies such as redd

sovereign debt defaults insights from history history provides many insights to address the issue of sovereign debt defaults this article first presents a detailed account of defaults in historical perspective it then discusses the solutions devised in the past to address sovereign debt crises and puts these into perspective with today s answers when crises occur finally the paper stresses the role of history when the events studied do not occur frequently and when archival data may shed new light on the process of the resolution of crises the impact of odious debts declarations of state succession and of international relations on sovereign defaults and on their settlement is thus also addressed copyright 2013 oxford university press

a meta analysis of contingent valuation forest studies abstract forest ecosystems provide a variety of valuable goods and services this paper presents a meta analysis of forest studies using the contingent valuation cv method to value the provision of forest values around the world in this meta analysis we estimate the marginal value of different management programs that provide a variety of forest goods and services our results show that willingness to pay wtp estimates for forest management programs are sensitive to the program s objectives particularly when linked to the provision of recreational services other variables such as the type of forest location survey mode or the type of respondent were also found to significantly affect the wtp estimates

economic growth and environmental degradation the environmental kuznets curve and sustainable development abstract in this paper we critically examine the concept of the environmental kuznets curve ekc it proposes that there is an inverted u shape relation between environmental degradation and income per capita so that eventually growth reduces the environmental impact of economic activity the concept is dependent on a model of the economy in which there is no feedback from the quality of the environment to production possibilities and in which trade has a neutral effect on environmental degradation the actual violation of these assumptions gives rise to fundamental problems in estimating the parameters of an ekc the paper identifies other econometric problems with estimates of the ekc and reviews a number of empirical studies the inference from some such ekc estimates that further development will reduce environmental degradation is dependent on the assumption that world per capita income is normally distributed when in fact median income is far below mean income we carry out simulations combining ekc estimates from the literature with world bank forecasts for economic growth for individual countries aggregating over countries to derive the global impact within the horizon of the bank s forecast 2025 global emissions of so 2 continue to increase forest loss stabilizes before the end of the period but tropical deforestation continues at a constant rate throughout the period

environmental kuznets curve for co2 in canada abstract according to the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis the relationship between per capita gdp and per capita pollutant emissions has an inverted u shape this implies that past a certain point economic growth may actually be profitable for environmental quality most studies on this subject are based on estimating fully parametric quadratic or cubic regression models while this is not technically wrong such an approach somewhat lacks flexibility since it may fail to detect the true shape of the relationship if it happens not to be of the specified form we use semiparametric and flexible nonlinear parametric modeling methods in an attempt to provide more robust inferences we find little evidence in favour of the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis our main results could be interpreted as indicating that the oil shock of the 1970s has had an important impact on progress towards less polluting technology and production

is there an environmental kuznets curve for deforestation abstract this paper examines the relationship between deforestation and gross domestic product gdp per capita in particular whether an inverted u relationship indicative of worsening then improving deforestation exists between them we note that previous work has used models with restrictive assumptions and recommend a more flexible random coefficients specification which allows for a greater degree of cross country heterogeneity empirical results using data for 76 developing countries between 1961 1992 suggest that the inverted u shaped relationship observed in other studies does not appear to be an empirical regularity with our less restrictive specification statistical tests indicate that this specification is supported by the data we argue that such results are not surprising in view of the wide diversity of physical and social characteristics that exist across countries

meta regression analysis a quantitative method of literature surveys abstract pedagogically literature reviews are instrumental they summarize the large literature written on a particular topic give coherence to the complex often disparate views expressed about an issue and serve as a springboard for new ideas however literature surveys rarely establish anything approximating unanimous consensus ironically this is just as true for the empirical economic literature to harmonize this dissonance we offer a quantitative methodology for reviewing the empirical economic literature meta regression analysis mra is the regression analysis of regression analyses mra tends to objectify the review process it studies the processes that produce empirical economic results as though they were any other social scientific phenomenon mra provides a framework for replication and offers a sensitivity analysis for model specification in this brief essay we propose a new method of reviewing economic literature mra and discuss its potential

is market liberalization compatible with food security storage trade and price policies for maize in southern africa abstract concern for the negative impacts of staple food price fluctuations limits the extent to which governments in low income countries are willing to liberalize their agricultural markets these concerns are legitimate as such price fluctuations can lead to high transactions costs for poor consumers in the short run and low growth in the long run however past government attempts to stabilize food prices completely have been expensive and ineffective use of a dynamic programming optimization model suggests that a different type of policy regime could reduce price variability significantly compared to what would prevail in free markets and could accomplish this at relatively low cost this policy regime includes allowing some official price flexibility with respect to changes in production and world price exporting when regional market opportunities exist and holding considerably lower stocks than in the past

forest loss and economic inequality in the solomon islands using small area estimation to link environmental change to welfare outcomes abstract to study welfare effects of environmental change data from household surveys may be linked to remote sensing data using spatial aggregation to link risks ecological fallacy since surveys are usually representative for areas larger than the spatial scale of decision making units this paper uses survey to census imputation to estimate welfare indicators for small areas to study the effect of deforestation on subsequent inequality in the rural solomon islands this country depends on logging for almost half of foreign exchange and one sixth of government revenue and most forested land remains under customary ownership a sharp increase in log exports to seven times the sustainable yield and a major shift in export destinations as other countries withdrew from the tropical log trade represents an exogenous shock that helps to identify effects of deforestation on inequality rather than the reverse relationship a standard deviation increase in the rate of forest loss over 2000 to 2012 raises the gini index of inequality in 2013 by one third of a standard deviation mean incomes and poverty rates are also higher implying that deforestation makes some households richer while others become poorer these precisely estimated effects would be obscured using more spatially aggregated data

environmental and ecological economics a citation analysis this study looks at two distinct questions dwhat have been the most influential journal articles in environmental economics and ecological economics over the 10 year period 1994 2003 t and dhow much overlap is there between the fields of environmental and ecological economics t we examine the references in all articles published in jeem and ecological economics ee over this period for each of these two fields a list of the top articles and top journals cited by articles published in jeem and ee is presented we also present some results based on our study of the isi journal citation reports we find that there is a significant overlap between the two fields at the journal level the two journals cite similar journals there is a correlation of 0 34 between the number of citations received by the journals that are most cited and the correlation is even higher if journal self citation is excluded the main differences are that ecological economics tends to cite but not be cited by general natural science journals more often than environmental economics does environmental economics cites more heavily from journals rather than other publications and citations in environmental economics are more concentrated on particular journals and individual publications however there is much less similarity at the level of individual articles nonmarket valuation articles dominate the most cited articles in jeem while green accounting sustainability and the environmental kuznets curve are all prominent topics in ee d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

estimation of limited dependent variable models with dummy endogenous regressors applied economists have long struggled with the question of how to accommodate binary endogenous regressors in models with binary and nonnegative outcomes i argue here that much of the difculty with limited dependent variables comes from a focus on structural parameters such as index coefcients instead of causal effects once the object of estimation is taken to be the causal effect of treatment several simple strategies are available these include conventional two stage least squares multiplicative models for conditional means linear approximation of nonlinear causal models models for distribution effects and quantile regression with an endogenous binary regressor the estimation strategies discussed in the article are illustrated by using multiple births to estimate the effect of childbearing on employment status and hours of work

is the environmental kuznets curve for deforestation a threatened theory a meta analysis of the literature abstract although widely studied deforestation remains a common research topic the relationship between economic development and deforestation is still in question this paper presents a meta analysis of environmental kuznets curve ekc studies for deforestation using 69 studies offering 547 estimations we shed light on why ekc results differ we investigate the incidence of choices made by authors such as econometric strategy measure of deforestation geographical area and presence of control variables on the probability of finding an ekc after a phase of work corroborating the ekc we find a turning point after the year 2001 building on our results we conclude that the ekc story will not fade until theoretical alternatives are provided

distributional effects of maize self sufficiency in zimbabwe implications for pricing and trade policy abstract maize self sufficiency has normally been an explicit policy goal throughout eastern and southern africa because of the perception that it could be achieved at prices below import parity and that it contributes to rural income growth however this analysis based on household survey data from zimbabwe and the results of an econometrically based simulation model indicates that a pricing policy geared towards maize self sufficiency would mainly benefit a small set of well off farmers and require either greater subsidies or higher prices to consumers many of whom are low income rural farmers in low rainfall areas the broader implications of this analysis are that even if the producer price needed for self sufficiency is below import parity the pursuit of food self sufficiency may inflate food costs and exacerbate rural and urban food insecurity compared to a self rellance policy involving imports

the impact of market liberalisation on food security in zambia abstract the main elements in agricultural market liberalisation have been the dismantling of the state institutions for marketing and distribution of agricultural produce the abolition of subsidies the liberalisation of import and export trade and the market determination of input and output prices economic policy reforms on the monetary fiscal and other fronts also impinged on the variables influencing production trade and consumption this paper highlights some of the undesirable offshoots of the previous policy regime and enumerates the specific policies that have been introduced since 1992 it describes the positive and negative outcomes witnessed so far finally it suggests what needs to be done to eliminate the prevailing major constraints to growth in food production and consumption

unravelling zimbabwe s food insecurity paradox implications for grain market reform in southern africa abstract the organization of zimbabwe s grain market while stimulating production and incomes in high potential smallholder areas since independence has actually contributed to food insecurity among grain deficit households in semi arid areas results of an econometric model indicate that over 100 000 tonnes of expensive commercial maize meal flow annually into rural areas while grain flows out through the state marketing channel this circuitous movement of grain a symptom of poorly functioning intrarural grain trade has effectively reduced incomes among poor rural consumers by as much as 30 the promotion of intrarural trade will require the removal of government restrictions and other critical barriers to private investment in grain trading

market emergence and transition arbitrage transaction costs and autarky in china s grain markets using trimonthly chinese provincial grain prices from 1988 to 1995 we estimate a parity bounds model of interregional trade for four subperiods to characterize how multiple aspects of market performance change during the process of economic transition for each period we estimate the extent to which arbitrage opportunities are realized by traders the transaction costs between location pairs and the likelihood that regions do not trade trade restrictions cannot explain the pattern of uneven market development over time infrastructure bottlenecks managerial incentive reforms and production specialization policies all were likely important factors affecting market performance

what has driven deforestation in developing countries since the 2000s evidence from new remote sensing data summary using newly released and globally available high resolution remote sensing data on forest loss we update the assessment of the cross country determinants of deforestation in developing countries we validate most of the major determinants found in the previous literature generally based on earlier time periods except for the role of institutional quality agricultural trade hitherto relatively neglected is found to be one of the main factors causing deforestation focusing on the effect of international trade we show that countries with different levels of relative forest cover react differently to a shock in agricultural exports value we also emphasize that taking countries development into account may be critical in assessing global deforestation trends the impact of trade is high in countries still endowed with a large proportion of forest cover while it is lower in countries with smaller remaining forest cover we finally estimate through a simple calibration exercise the requirements for a cost effective redd policy for compensating trade losses in an open economy exporting agricultural commodities and endowed with tropical forests we conclude that in a world with increasing global demand it might be costly to compensate totally and thus to offer the right incentives for developing countries to limit deforestation

maize market reform in zimbabwe abstract a major constraint on the design and implementation of grain market liberalization throughout the world is governments concerns with retaining enough influence over the evolving system to distribute prices and incomes to various groups in politically desired ways this article considers the effects of alternative forms of maize market reform on various socioeconomic groups and the marketing board s operations in zimbabwe based on results of a dual market spatial equilibrium model partial and more complete reform create substantially different distributional effects however urban consumers and many rural small holders would be better off with either consumers and many rural small holders would be better off with either configuration of market reform consi prices the full benefits of market reform require active government support for the development of private trade

do constitutions cause large governments quasi experimental evidence abstract how do constitutional rules for elections and legislation affect the size of government we ask this question in a new sample of about 80 countries in the 1990s in addition to conventional regression methods we use quasi experimental matching methods which more convincingly address legitimate criticisms of causal inference from cross country data both sets of estimates suggest that presidential regimes and majoritarian elections produce smaller governments

is environmental degradation an inevitable consequence of economic growth tunneling through the environmental kuznets curve abstract economywide reforms often contribute simultaneously to economic social and environmental gains however unintended adverse side effects occur in many cases when such growth inducing reforms are undertaken while neglecting other policy market or institutional imperfections the remedy does not generally require reversal of the original economywide reforms but rather the ex ante implementation of additional complementary measures that remove such imperfections the ekc approach seeks to relate the state of the environment to the stage of development developing countries could learn from the experiences of industrialized nations and restructure growth and development to tunnel through any potential ekc thereby avoiding going through the same stages of growth that involve relatively high and even irreversible levels of environmental harm an environmentally adjusted measure of national income could significantly change the shape of the development environment relationship recommendations for decision making include actively seeking win win policies that simultaneously yield both economic and environmental gains pre empting environmental harm through ex ante remedial measures and fine tuning reform policies to avoid severe environmental damage the adoption of more sustainable policies will facilitate the attainment of higher levels of development at a lower environmental cost

sovereign default interest rates and political uncertainty in emerging markets abstract a large body of the empirical literature shows that high turnover rates length of tenure of policymakers and the degree of conflict within a country affects sovereign spreads debt and default rates we help to rationalize such claims by including these political features in a dynamic stochastic small open economy model of sovereign debt and default in this way we offer a complementary approach to the econometric analyses in the literature consistent with the data the quantitative analysis shows that politically unstable and more polarized economies experience higher default rates and larger level and volatility of sovereign interest rate spreads

commercialization of smallholder agriculture policy requirements for the malnourished poor abstract the nutritional impact of increased commercialization of smallholder agriculture in developing countries while generally positive may in certain circumstances be unfavourable adverse policies tend to be the problem in these circum stances the international food policy research institute has conducted re search to identify the key factors in this process and in march 1989 conducted a workshop in guatemala for researchers and policy makers this report summarizes the findings and policy recommendations that emerged

does trade openness contribute to food security a dynamic panel analysis abstract despite significant progress in the fight against hunger during the last decades food insecurity remains a major problem in many countries especially developing ones in this study we use a large cross country data to investigate the impact of trade openness and other factors on food security measured by dietary energy consumption we employ a system gmm approach to account for unobserved heterogeneity correlated individual effects and potential endogeneity of the explanatory variables the empirical results reveal that trade openness and economic growth exert positive and significant impacts on dietary energy consumption and also contribute to improvements in dietary diversity the results are robust to the inclusion of additional variables capturing specific agro climatic constraints e g weather related and regional country characteristics and to the sample composition most geographical regions are found to have significantly higher food security levels compared to sub saharan africa additional results indicate that besides calorie consumption trade openness also improves dietary diversity and diet quality related aspects of food security

rich enough to go renewable but too early to leave fossil energy abstract typically environmental kuznets curve ekc studies on energy concentrate on the emissions produced from energy production or consumption and neglect the aspect of exhaustion of a natural resource which is an irreversible result against any definition of sustainability and intergenerational equity this paper investigates whether there is an environmental kuznets curve for renewable energy whether there should be one and if there is what it should stand for for this reason the paper employs balanced panel data for 33 european member and candidate state countries that produce crude oil natural gas coal and renewable energy for the years 1990 2010 to investigate the relationship between their scale of economic activity fossil energy production and the production of renewable energy results from random effects models together with arellano bond estimator models identify the u shape for the environmental kuznets curve only for renewable energy and coal production a theoretical justification on the mechanisms possibly driving the environmental kuznets curve for renewable energy are also discussed