institutional constraints and deforestation an application to mexico 1 introduction in many tropical regions a key factor influencing deforestation is thought to be the lack of effective property rights and other institutional structures controlling access to and use of forests 1 where such institutions exist they limit access to and conversion of forest land thus acting as a deterrent to deforestation in the absence of formal ownership rules traditional common property regimes in some forested regions have also proven to be effective in controlling the open access deforestation problem gibson 2001 larson and bromley 1990 richards 1997 in short formal and informal institutions can influence the process of forest loss by imposing increased costs of conversion on farmers who clear forest land this article is concerned with analyzing the role of formal and informal institutions as constraints on the conversion of forest land to agriculture in developing countries the perspective on institutions adopted here follows the approach of north 1990 who defines institutions as humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction and that affect the performance of the economy by their effect on the costs of exchange and production in analyzing the relation between institutional constraints and the amount of forest land converted for use by smallholders this article makes several contributions first it demonstrates that if institutions raise the costs of land conversion then it is possible to utilize an agricultural household model to formalize the resulting impacts on the amount of converted land used by all farming households moreover the equilibrium level of land cleared will differ under conditions of no institutional constraints that is the pure open access situation compared to c onditions where effective institutions exist to control land conversion because institutions raise the cost of land clearing more land should be converted under pure open access 2 this in turn implies that the existence of institutional constraints prevents the adjustment of the stock of converted land to the long run equilibrium desired by agricultural households which is the amount of land that could be cleared under open access a dynamic panel analysis is therefore employed to test the hypothesis that the presence of institutions to control agricultural conversion can significantly affect deforestation the model of land expansion is applied to the case of mexico in the pre nafta north american free trade agreement reform era 1960 85 during this period the existence of ejido or communal land ownership for the vast majority of forest land meant that strong institutional controls may have restricted the rate of adjustment in the amount of new land converted and thus limited agricultural expansion sarukhan and larson 2001 the analysis also has direct relevance for the post nafta period particularly because the 1992 land reforms sanction changes in the traditional ejido land ownership structure ii a pure open access model of forest land conversion the following model of forest conversion is based on an approach similar to that of cropper et al 1999 lopez 1997 1998a and panayotou and sungsuwan 1994 assume that the economic behavior of all j rural smallholder households in the agricultural sector of a developing country can be summarized by the behavior of a representative jth household although the representative household is utility maximizing it is a price taker in both input and output markets farm and off farm labor of the household are assumed to be perfect substitutes such that the opportunity cost of the household s time i e its wage rate is exogenously determined the household s behavior is therefore recursive in the sense that the production decisions are made first and then the consumption decisions singh et al 1986 in any time period t let the profit function of the representative agricultural household s production decisions be defined as 1 max pi p w w

social capital in community level environmental governance a critique social capital is often claimed to facilitate collective action regarding the management of complex environmental goods and services however there is little systematic analysis in the literature that explains the way social capital aids in fostering collective action the paper integrates ideas from institutional ecological economics sociology and anthropology to argue that power relations involving struggle and resistance should be acknowledged as they affect collective action we address the question of why social capital should not be straightforwardly associated positively with common property resource management to unravel the complexity of the links between social capital collective action and common property resource management the concepts of common knowledge and symbolic power are introduced

land clearance and social capital in mountain agro ecosystems the case of opuntia scrubland in ayacucho peru abstract opuntia scrublands are important ecological economic systems in rural andean areas they provide goods for peasants diet and animal feed as well as cochineal insects a highly valued source of dyes land clearance on these scrublands promotes changes in land use from nonproductive wilderness to cochineal and fruit harvest areas grazing lands and fuel wood supply zones here we empirically explore the role of social capital on land clearance based on a case study of the humanga region of ayacucho peru the literature on social capital is showing evidence of the positive effect of social capital on development actions and on environmental conservation in rural areas of developing countries such as participatory forest management here the notion of social capital is captured by the idea that some features of social organization such as networks facilitate coordination and cooperation within the peasant communities that help in managing different economic activities both on and off farm the habilitation of the scrublands in the andean mountain environment could be generating negative externalities as a consequence of altering the vegetation cover such as soil erosion because the benefits arising from land clearance activities are obtained by cochineal collecting households and the negative environmental effects are costs imposed upon noncochineal collectors the social capital associated with scrubland habilitation could be perverse from an agro environmental viewpoint and a revision of some government policies and of some ngos actions for rural development through the promotion of various community networks in this deprived area could be needed

regulating stock externalities under uncertainty abstract using a simple analytical model incorporating benefits of a stock costs of adjusting the stock and uncertainty in costs we uncover several important principles governing the choice of price based policies e g taxes relative to quantity based policies e g tradable permits for controlling stock externalities as in weitzman rev econom stud 41 4 1974 477 the relative slopes of the marginal benefits and costs of controlling the externality continue to be critical determinants of the efficiency of prices relative to quantities with flatter marginal benefits and steeper marginal costs favoring prices but some important adjustments for dynamic effects are necessary including correlation of cost shocks across time discounting stock decay and the rate of benefits growth applied to the problem of greenhouse gases and climate change we find that a price based instrument generates several times the expected net benefits of a quantity instrument

deforestation and the rule of law in a cross section of countries relationships between deforestation and population pressure income growth and insecure property rights are examined with data from 120 countries insecure property rights are hypothesized to arise from two sources government instability or inability to enforce ownership and an absence of government accountability the former source is captured by measures of general lawlessness such as guerrilla warfare revolution and frequent constitutional change the latter is proxied by variables indicating the type of government executive frequency of political purges and the existence of an elected legislature general support is indicated for the property rights hypothesis and for the effects of population growth

optimal farm size in an uncertain land market the case of kyrgyz republic this article applies a real options model to the problem of land development making use of the 1998 2001 kyrgyz household budget survey we show that when the hypothesis of decreasing return to scale holds the relation between the threshold value of revenue per hectare and the amount of land cultivated is positive in addition the relation between the threshold and the amount of land owned is positive in the case of continuous supply of land and negative when there is discontinuous supply of land the direct consequence is that in the first case smaller farms will be more willing to rent land and exercise the option where in the second case larger farms will exercise first the results suggest three main conclusions i the combination of uncertainty and irreversibility is an important factor in land development decisions ii farmer behavior is consistent with the continuous profit maximization model and iii farming unit revenue tends to be positively related to farm size once uncertainty is properly accounted for

labour im mobility and monopsonistic exploitation of workers in the urban informal sector lessons from a field study it is well recognised in labour economics that employers in monopsonistic competition have market power to set wages below the productivity of workers if workers are immobile which causes monopsonistic exploitation of workers monopsonistic exploitation is propelled by employers expectations about the degree of im mobility of workers and therefore by ex post mobility of workers it hence begs a question of what determines the relative im mobility of informal workers which has significant implications for monopsonistic exploitation and working poverty in the urban informal sector from our field study of urban and peri urban labour markets in bangladesh by modifying the method of stochastic frontier analysis we explain the behavioural foundation to the relative im mobility of informal workers we thereby unravel the effects of individual and household characteristics sociological institutional factors and household ties including worker s kinship on the relative immobility of a worker that can in turn explain monopsonistic exploitation and working poverty widely prevalent in the urban informal sector of south asia

stocasthic frontiers and wage inefficiency in venezuela this paper analyzes wage inefficiency in venezuela in 2006 based on the methodology of stochastic frontiers empirical results indicate that employers inefficiency is above 30 while for employees inefficiency is not statistical significant this can be explained by government role in the labor market and by the fact that employers may be paying efficiency wages to increase productivity

reservation wages and the cost of unemployment this paper studies direct evidence on reservation wages reported in great britain in 1982 to assess 1 whether such asking prices are high and 2 whether variations in these reservation wages are related to differences in measures of the subjective and objective costs of unemployment a majority overall and for various subgroups reports reservation wages no higher than own past wages adjusted for earnings growth but there is nonetheless considerable dispersion in the ratio of reservation to past wages reservation wages are somewhat related to measures of the differential cost of unemployment most clearly for men although the independent role of benefits is often imprecisely measured however exactly which of these costs matter differs significantly according to whether the separation from last employment was voluntary or involuntary copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

asymmetric effects of the business cycle on carbon dioxide emissions abstract long term carbon dioxide emissions forecasts rely on the assumption that the economic growth rate is constant over long time horizons and exclude the business cycle thereby ignoring a fundamental component of the macroeconomy this paper considers how the business cycle affects emissions forecasts and shows the implicit assumption in current forecasts that the elasticity of emissions is constant with respect to gdp is wrong in the united states emissions fall more sharply when gdp declines than they rise when gdp increases this is partly due to a decrease in industrial energy intensity as gdp declines a simulation shows that accounting for the business cycle results in 5 lower cumulative emissions through 2050 relative to the baseline forecast

land use change with spatially explicit data a dynamic approach most of the economic literature that uses spatially explicit data to estimate the determinants of land use change is limited to static models and cross sectional data sets recent attempts to move to a more dynamic analysis include using panel data sets and survival analysis in this study we use a discrete choice dynamic model of land use where the agent s choices are regarded as the solution to a dynamic optimization problem the irreversibility of some decisions expectations about future prices and forward looking behavior of the land operator can all be accounted for our results show that a model specification that incorporates some of the complexities of the decision process improves upon results found in the existing literature first prediction accuracy of land use change is superior to any of the existing models second we demonstrate that models that do not account for transactions costs tend to overestimate the effects of changes in transportation costs

environmental policy government and the market environmental policy is made in a context of both market failure and government failure on the one hand leaving environmental protection to the free market relying on notions of corporate social responsibility and altruistic consumer and shareholder preferences will not deliver optimal results on the other hand nationalizing the delivery of environmental protection is likely to fail because nation states rarely have the depth and quality of information required to instruct all the relevant agents to make appropriate decisions thus as for many areas of policy appropriate models of environmental intervention will lie between these two extremes while it is impossible to specify general rules concerning the precise form of intervention in part because the type of intervention depends upon value judgements this paper sets out some of the considerations that are particular to environmental policy and explores several principles for policy design including information coordination and principal agent problems with a particular focus on the international context

local identification and valuation of ecosystem goods and services from opuntia scrublands of ayacucho peru abstract opuntia scrublands are important ecological economic systems in the andean area they perform a major role protecting slopes against erosion improving the soil properties and providing a variety of products employed in the human diet and in animal feeding as well as cochineal insects a highly valued source of dyes the collection of the insects has represented an important economic activity for the local communities since pre columbian times current peruvian production represents between 85 and 90 of the global market and is mainly based on collection of the insect in natural opuntia scrublands located in the poorest andean areas of ayacucho although much is known about the financial benefits of cochineal for exporters and dye manufacturers information about the value of standing opuntia scrubs to collectors and the relative contribution of opuntia scrubs to their household economies is scarce here we contribute to the estimation of the use value of opuntia scrublands to local communities in ayacucho by initially exploring the cultural domain of opuntia in order to identify the ecosystem goods and services recognized by peasants and later presenting empirical estimates of their importance to annual household income

environmental externalities in traditional agriculture and the impact of trade liberalization the case of ghana abstract this paper provides a framework for the evaluation of trade policies that explicitly considers the effects of such policies on the environmental resources biomass in doing this we estimate the effects of biomass as a factor of agricultural production and test the hypothesis that farmers efficiently exploit biomass a resource held in common property the main findings are i biomass is an important factor of production in ghanian agriculture ii the biomass resource is exploited beyond the socially optimal level iii a deepening of trade liberalization is likely to induce further losses of biomass and deforestation and iv national income is likely to fall in response to further trade liberalization

a two tiered earnings frontier estimation of employer and employee information in the labor market this pap er develops a two tiered frontier estimation procedure to decompose the residual of an earnings function into three components the first component can be interpreted as being purely random search theory is used to show that the other two components represent employee and employer ignorance of offer and reservation wages respectively relative employee and employer ignorance estimates are presented for various population strata copyright 1987 by mit press

imperfections in the economics of public policy imperfections in markets and climate change the economics of public policy has suffered from collective amnesia we have forgotten or ignored much of the tradition of public policy in imperfect economies whose foundations were laid by james meade and paul samuelson this has been associated with a period of around two decades from the early 1980s to the early 2000s where the economics of public policy has bent to political winds and has fed arguments for government to get out of the way and leave everything to the markets to self interest and to self regulation this has manifested itself via the choice of models those which imply often directly from assumptions passive government patterns of teaching the marginalisation of public economies in imperfect economics and compartmentalisation examples in climate change where this amnesia has misled include approaches to discounting and the failure to make non marginal change central to analysis on the other hand creative application of modern public economics gives interesting results such as the possibility of making both current and future generations better off and of informed discussion complementing economic instruments there are strong formal analogies between policy on climate change and on behavioural economics indeed there seems to be great potential in the combination of these two fields jel a10 a12 d61 d62 d63

estimating reservation wages of employed workers using a stochastic frontier according to search theory workers form reservation wages such that employment offers paying wages less than the reservation wage are rejected the first job offer paying a wage higher than the reservation wage is accepted and search is terminated though the reservation wage is clearly a matter of individual taste and unobservable a number of empirical articles have nevertheless appeared on the subject the present paper adds to this literature its novel aspects are that it uses data on employed workers rather than unemployed workers as is usually the case and that it applies a comparatively new econometric technique stochastic frontier estimation to the problem of estimating reservation wages our interests in this paper are twofold first the paper provides estimates of worker reservation wages utilizing the stochastic frontier regression technique second we use these estimates to test various hypotheses regarding the response of reservation wages to factors that search theory suggests are important in the determination of reservation wages the remainder of the paper is organized as follows section ii discusses the previous empirical literature on the reservation wage section iii sketches the theory and estimation techniques we use section iv lays out a framework for assessing the validity of the approach used here finally section v presents the empirical results

links between economic liberalization and rural resource degradation in the developing regions this paper examines evidence of the effects of economic liberalization and globalization on rural resource degradation in developing countries the principal resource effects of concern are processes of land use change leading to forestland conversion degradation and deforestation the main trends in globalization of interest are trade liberalization and economy wide reforms in developing countries that have opened up the agroindustrial sectors thus increasing their export orientation such reforms have clearly spurred agroindustrialization rural development and economic growth but there is also concern that there may be direct and indirect impacts on rural resource degradation the direct impacts may occur as increased agricultural activity leads to conversion of forests and increased land degradation from unsustainable production methods however there may also be indirect effects if agroindustrial development displaces landless near landless and rural poor generally who then migrate to marginal agricultural lands and forest frontier regions this paper explores these direct and indirect effects of globalization and agroindustrialization on rural resource degradation both generally plus through examining case study evidence the paper focuses in particular on the examples of structural adjustment trade liberalization and agricultural development in ghana and maize sector liberalization in mexico under north american free trade agreement nafta

reservation wages and unemployment in manufacturing a case study the distribution and determinants of reservation wages are examined using a large new data set of unemployed skilled manufacturing workers reservation wage ratios are smaller than previous evidence would suggest while the period of unemployment and eligibility for unemployment compensation play their anticipated roles in addition two new relationships are demonstrated first workers displaced from jobs outside their primary occupation have significantly lower reservation wages than those unemployed from their major occupation second the requirement for a union job is shown to play a surprisingly large and important role in determining reservation wages finally a simultaneous equation system captures the possibility of dual causation between reservation wages and months of unemployment we find no evidence that higher reservation wages cause longer unemployment

deforestation and development in a small open economy abstract our economy faces world prices and starts with a large endowment of land in forest and a small endowment of land in agriculture clearing of forested land yields marketable timber and a unit of land for agriculture early the high price of agricultural land drives the clearing process later the profit from marketing timber from the cleared land drives the process dates of phase transitions are endogenous we also set out a submodel of perpetual cyclic clearing and reforesting and show that it when cyclical harvesting regrowing is optimal the extent of clearing can be relatively large

conservation agriculture organic marketing and collective action in the honduran hillsides conservation agriculture ca is often perceived to provide win win outcomes for farmers leading to reduced erosion and off site sedimentation as well as improved soil fertility and productivity however adoption rates for ca in many regions of the world remain below expected levels this article looks at the effects of participation in organic markets and farmers organizations on the adoption of soil conservation practices based on original survey data from 241 small scale farm households in honduras we find that both participation in organic markets and farmer based groups have positive effects on the number of soil conservation practices adopted the results indicate that besides supply oriented policy measures such as the provision of technical assistance and extension demand related factors are likely to play an important role in sustainable soil management demand oriented policy measures include support for labeling initiatives and consumer education to facilitate value added product differentiation and market segmentation jel classifications q01 q12 q13 q16

assessing ricardian equivalence this paper reviews the literature on ricardian equivalence this hypothesis may be interpreted as a generalisation to the short and the long run of the theories which put no weight on the real effects of public policies on aggregate demand we argue that ricardian equivalence relies on both permanent income hypothesis and the fulfilment of the intertemporal government budget constraint the theoretical literature emphasises several reasons for departures from this hypothesis however the empirical literature is inconclusive when ricardian equivalence is tested in a life cycle framework the hypothesis is usually rejected while when the empirical analysis is based on optimising models it is usually accepted

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

the environmental kuznets curve under a new framework the role of social capital in water pollution we advance a case for including social capital in an environmental kuznets curve analysis using highly disaggregated data of water pollution in louisiana we create a social capital index and employ parametric and spatial panel regression models to explain water pollution dynamics

social dilemmas and public range management in nevada abstract increasing tension in the nevada ranch community may have had a negative impact on social capital social capital is important because it facilitates cooperation in resolving social dilemmas related to public range management in this paper we use a survey of public grazing permit holders in nevada to investigate factors that affect ranchers relationships with the u s forest service and bureau of land management results indicate that contrary to expectations economic factors such as income and ranch size have little or no effect on relationships in the nevada ranch community on ranchers disagreements with public land managers and the deterioration in rancher land agency relations rather these relationships appear to be affected to a greater extent by our measures of social capital personal characteristics and experience with wildfire indeed disagreements with the public agencies were mainly affected by gender males tended to have more disagreements lack of trust and disputes concerning responses to wildfire which increased the chance of disagreement not surprisingly disagreement resulted in a deterioration of relationships that could be offset by higher levels of social capital particularly trust and positive attitudes towards the future of ranching and the community as measured by responses to a variety of attitudinal questions we conclude that while there remain opportunities to build on existing social capital in the community horizontal relations ranchers and the public agencies need to work on building vertical relations thereby increasing trust this could potentially help in the resolution of social dilemmas related to range management

capitals and capabilities a framework for analyzing peasant viability rural livelihoods and poverty abstract on the basis of themes emerging in current debates on rural development in latin america this paper develops an analytical framework for analyzing rural livelihoods in terms of their sustainability and their implications for rural poverty the framework argues that our analyses of rural livelihoods need to understand them in terms of a people s access to five types of capital asset b the ways in which they combine and transform those assets in the building of livelihoods that as far as possible meet their material and their experiential needs c the ways in which people are able to expand their asset bases through engaging with other actors through relationships governed by the logics of the state market and civil society and d the ways in which they are able to deploy and enhance their capabilities both to make living more meaningful and to change the dominant rules and relationships governing the ways in which resources are controlled distributed and transformed in society particular attention is paid to the importance of social capital as an asset through which people are able to widen their access to resources and other actors

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

temporal and spatial modelling of tropical deforestation a survival analysis linking satellite and household survey data we estimate a spatially explicit model of the forest clearance process among smallholder farmers in an agricultural frontier of southern mexico our analysis takes as its point of departure a simple utility maximising model that suggests many possible determinants of deforestation in an economic environment characterised by missing or thin markets hypotheses from the model are tested on a data set that combines a time series of satellite imagery with data collected from a survey of farm households whose agricultural plots were geo referenced using a global positioning system gps we implement a survival analysis to identify the effect of household level explanatory variables on the probability of deforestation this approach allows us to introduce a measure of the time until clearance as a covariate thereby affording a control for the effect of potentially important explanatory variables that vary through time but are not directly observable in addition to identifying several variables relevant for policy analysis including household demographics proximity to roads and government provision of agricultural support model results suggest that the deforestation process is characterised by non linear duration dependence with the probability of forest clearance first decreasing and then increasing with the passage of time

reassessing discretionary fiscal policy in 1992 president bush proposed legislation intended to speed up the recovery from the 1990 91 recession congress rejected this proposal for countercyclical fiscal policy stimulus in early 1993 president clinton proposed his own stimulus package but congress rejected this proposal too many reasons were given for deciding against these two discretionary fiscal policy proposals but perhaps the most common one was the large federal budget deficit in the early 1990s with the rapid disappearance of budget deficits in recent years this reason to vote against a discretionary fiscal stimulus is unlikely to be mentioned in the next economic cycle discretionary countercyclical fiscal policy again appears to be a politically feasible option but should america use it after so many years of disuse much has happened in macroeconomics since the 1960s and 1970s when discretionary countercyclical fiscal policy was last considered a serious option in the united states first monetary policy making has changed substantially over the last two decades the federal reserve s interest rate decisions have become more explicit more systematic and more reactive to changes in both inflation and output the fed has placed a greater emphasis on keeping inflation low the experience with this new policy has been very favorable inflation has been low since the early 1980s and the real economy has been more stable the 1980s and 1990s saw two lengthy expansions separated by a relatively short and mild recession in terms of the tradeoff between output variability and inflation

property rights and deforestation in the brazilian amazon this paper focuses on the impact of property rights insecurity on deforestation in the brazilian legal amazon deforestation is considered as a risk management strategy property rights insecurity reduces the present value of forests and fosters forest conversion into agricultural and pasture lands moreover deforestation is the consequence of strategic interactions between landowners and squatters landowners clear the forest preventively in order to assert the productive use of land and to reduce the expropriation risk squatters invade land plots clear the forest and may afterwards gain official recognition with formal property titles a particular attention is paid to the measure of land property rights insecurity in the brazilian context it is assumed that property rights insecurity has a multidimensional character taken into account by the number of homicides related to land conflicts and expropriation procedures principal component analysis allows synthesising such information an econometric model of deforestation is estimated on a panel dataset on the 1988 2000 period and the nine states of the brazilian legal amazon the hypothesis that insecure land property rights contribute to higher rates of deforestation is not rejected when the simultaneity bias between insecure property rights and deforestation is addressed this result questions the modality of the brazilian land reform that considers forested areas as unproductive and thus open for expropriation procedures

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

is the income elasticity of environmental improvements less than one we estimated the income elasticity of environmental improvements for a number of european data sets the value of this parameter is consistently found to be less than one with few exceptions our findings are compared with state of the art contingent valuation studies from other countries we also compared our findings with those reported in the literature on charitable donations and corporate donations these studies show a similar pattern donations decrease as a percentage of income as income increases

capturing household level spatial influence in agricultural management using random effects regression abstract data on agricultural and natural resource management typically have spatial patterns related to the landscapes from which they came consequently econometric models designed to explain the determinants of humans natural resource management practices or their outcomes often have spatial structure that can bring bias or inefficiency to parameter estimates although econometric tools are available to correct for spatial structure such tools are largely lacking for use with discrete dependent variable models while one obvious solution would be to develop the necessary tools an alternative is to identify conditions under which spatial dependency can be managed effectively without formal spatial autoregressive models this study examines conditions under which spatial structure corresponds closely to defined agro ecological zones making it possible to model spatial effects by random effects regression using household survey data sampled along agro ecological zone strata this article develops two models of links between farmer assets and agricultural natural resource degradation in southern peru the first stage model looks at determinants of crop yield loss over time an index of soil productivity while the second stage model looks at determinants of the extent of fallow cycles in crop rotation a key agricultural practice reducing crop yield loss diagnostic statistics for spatial dependency reveal spatial structure particularly in the fallow model this spatial dependency is eliminated in the ordinary least squares ols models by inclusion of the agro ecological zone random effects in the spatially dependent fallow model comparison of coefficient estimates between ols and the spatial autoregressive maximum likelihood models showed ols with random effects to give virtually identical results to the spatial autoregressive models making the latter unnecessary these results show that spatial structure in natural resource management models can sometimes be captured by zonal variables when this occurs random effects regression can largely eliminate spatial dependency a necessary precondition for this approach with household survey data is prior sample stratification according to landscape characteristics where random effects models can effectively capture spatial structure they may also offer analysts greater flexibility in analyzing models with limited dependent variables

environmental policy and the economic downturn this paper considers how environmental policies should respond to macroeconomic downturns it first explores the implications of the global economic downturn of 2008 09 for environmental policies focusing in particular on the example of action against climate change the arguments for and against activist fiscal policies in general are then reviewed and the case made that a demand induced downturn provides a very good opportunity to undertake a necessary step change in the public spending component of environmental policies and to start working through a backlog of public investment to improve the environment fiscal policy should be used to improve the allocation of resources across time and space recent fiscal stimuli are considered in the light of this discussion it is also argued that there is little cause to delay the introduction of price signals to internalise environmental externalities but the levels at which such signals should be set requires careful analysis changes over the business cycle may be warranted depending on the nature of the environmental externality and the cause s of the business cycle in question

changing political regimes and tropical deforestation expansion of agriculture is a main cause of tropical deforestation government policies and weak property rights contribute to this process by encouraging landowners and landless to accelerate land clearing using panel data common to previous studies we add the dimension of new political regimes democratic and non democratic and investigate how the rate of agricultural land expansion in tropical countries depends on the nature and persistence of each regime we find that both new autocratic and democratic regimes have accelerated the expansion of agricultural land thus yielding support to some of the findings in the earlier literature interesting differences emerge between regions with the impact being most pronounced in latin america we interpret these results mainly in the context of increasing tenure and ownership insecurity which in turn is driven by the tendency of new regimes to implement land reforms as a form of social and economic policy or voter payback the argument is developed more formally using a simple competitive land use model that incorporates political regime dependent confiscation risk and agricultural subsidy policy

the economics of tropical forest land use options tropical deforestation is generally characterized as conversion of forest land to alternative uses notably agriculture this would suggest the need for rational decision making concerning the optimal allocation of tropical forest land between competing uses the following paper explores this problem by devising rules for determining optimal land use allocation between timber and agriculture at the stand and forest levels a complementary intertemporal model for optimal allocation of forest land to agricultural conversion at the forest level is also developed and used to derive a demand relationship for agricultural conversion which is then approximated through empirical estimation

combining price and quantity controls to mitigate global climate change abstract uncertainty about compliance costs causes otherwise equivalent price and quantity controls to behave differently and leads to divergent welfare consequences although most of the debate on global climate change policy has focused on quantity controls due to their political appeal this paper argues that price controls are more efficient simulations based on a stochastic computable general equilibrium model indicate that the expected welfare gain from the optimal price policy is five times higher than the expected gain from the optimal quantity policy an alternative hybrid policy combines both the political appeal of quantity controls with the efficiency of prices using an initial distribution of tradeable permits to set a quantitative target but allowing additional permits to be purchased at a fixed trigger price even sub optimal hybrid policies offer dramatic efficiency improvements over otherwise standard quantity controls for example a 50 trigger price per ton of carbon converts the 3 trillion expected loss associated with a simple 1990 emission target to a 150 billion gain these results suggest that a hybrid policy is an attractive alternative to either a pure price or quantity system

ecosystem service value and agricultural conversion in the amazon implications for policy intervention we explore the welfare implications of agricultural expansion in the brazilian amazon by comparing spatially explicit estimates of soybean rents and the value of ecosystem services although these estimates are generated from different datasets models and estimation techniques the values are comparable such that the value of ecosystem services is greater than soybean rents for about 61 of the total area and 24 of the area where soybean rents are positive if protected areas are well enforced based on the balance between the benefits and costs of conversion failure to value ecosystem services reduces total social welfare by 7 13 billion dollars annually relative to an optimum policy instruments that internalize the value of ecosystem services via protected lands land conversion taxes conservation subsidies or excise taxes can avoid much of this loss regardless of intervention regime policy makers should be cognizant of the diminishing net benefits of converting natural ecosystems to agriculture realizing the final 3 8 requires the conversion of an additional 15 natural ecosystems to soybean production

public open access and private timber harvests theory and application to the effects of trade liberalization in mexico a common popular assertion is that trade liberalization encourages deforestation but whether this is true depends on how trade policies affect the allocation of land among competing uses and how they influence illegal cutting of public forests a model is presented that allows for forests to be either public or private and public forests are divided into protected or managed and threatened categories effects of price changes are shown on each part of the forest an empirical version of the model is applied to the case of mexico with nafta most scenarios considered show that nafta will have positive long run effects on forest cover in mexico but that this is net of losses on private lands

environmental jobs and growth in the united states abstract green growth is increasingly being seen as a means of simultaneously meeting current and future climate change obligations and reducing unemployment this paper uses detailed industry level data from the bureau of labor statistic s green goods and services survey to examine how the provision of so called green goods and services has affected various aspects of the us economy our descriptive results reveal that those states and industries that were relatively green in 2010 became even greener in 2011 to investigate further we include green goods and services in a production function the results show that between 2010 and 2011 industries that have increased their share of green employment have reduced their productivity although this negative correlation was only for the manufacture of green goods and not for the supply of green services in further analysis we investigate skill technology complementarities in the production of green goods and services and show that industries that increased their provision of green goods and services grew more slowly reduced their expenditure on technology inputs and increased their demand for medium educated workers whilst simultaneously reducing their demand for lower skilled workers

measuring wage discrimination in italy a random coefficient approach using data from a representative 1989 household survey for italy we estimate random coefficient earnings frontiers by gender marital status and location these estimates are used to calculate discrimination indices our results show that fixed coefficients can be rejected in all cases a wide range on the estimated coefficients indicates a high degree of variation in the quality of the observed human capital variables as well as different degrees of ability as perceived by the employer we find reverse discrimination for single females in the south and the north for married females there is evidence of discrimination particularly in the south we isolate the effects of tenure and education on discrimination and find that these reduce discrimination for southern married females

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

constrained by hours and restricted in wages the quality of matches in the labor market this paper examines the explicit loss born by workers who face constraints in their working hours by analyzing differences in actual and desired hours and wages men tend to be underemployed while women are evenly split between over and underemployment losses in surplus are generally small but 10 of underemployed men and women experience losses of more than 34 or 50 of surplus respectively the loss measure is also an important determinant in predicting labor market transitions meaning increases in surplus losses generate a higher probability of changing from workers present jobs or changing the number of hours jel j22 j41

the macroeconomic role of fiscal policy this article examines the new consensus that fiscal policy should have no macroeconomic role in flexible inflation targeting regimes there is little basis for this presumption fiscal policy remains important in setting the policy mix and in managing shocks and imbalances the credibility of an inflation targeting regime should be enhanced rather than reduced if fiscal policy plays its proper role it is true nevertheless that the costs of focusing fiscal policy narrowly on public sector concerns may not be very great most of the time however when interest rates cannot be used the role of fiscal policy must be different with interest rates at their lower bound of zero there is no plausible alternative for asymmetric shocks and adjustments in emu fiscal policy needs ideally to substitute for the interest rate policy reaction function of the consensus but the difficulties are very great we suggest a policy focus on real exchange rates as a way of resolving some of the dilemmas there is a serious danger that orthodox views about fiscal policy drawn from the consensus will be inappropriately applied especially in europe copyright 2005 oxford university press

is fiscal policy poised for a comeback for several decades discretionary fiscal policy has been in disrepute most economists viewed it as unnecessary because monetary policy was up to the job of stabilizing the economy economists also viewed fiscal policy as too clumsy to deal with the relatively short recessions that became the post war norm but the experience of japan and the near japan experience of the united states in 2001 3 have renewed some of the old case for fiscal policy low interest environments in which monetary policy becomes ineffective turn out to be a real danger not a myth economic slumps that last for a number of years offering ample time to implement fiscal expansion also turn out to be possible as a result the case for fiscal policy made by the first generation of keynesians has experienced a real revival copyright 2005 oxford university press

joseph schumpeter lecture the great moderation the great panic and the great contraction this lecture examines the causes of the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession on the macroeconomic side the great moderation encouraged an overly optimistic assessment of risk combined with low interest rates reflecting both loose monetary policy and relatively high asian savings rates that encouraged a build up of excessive leverage in the banking system on the microeconomic side distorted incentives led to a concentration and mispricing of risk informational complexities associated with new financial assets and the interconnectedness of financial institutions then resulted in the closure of funding markets and a flight to safety when loan defaults rose unexpectedly the episode indicates the need to focus on agency and information problems between banks and their funders in addition to those between the banks and their borrowers it also suggests that the process of financial intermediation should play a more prominent role in macroeconomic models jel e32 e44 e52 e58 f32 g01 g21

permanent and temporary policy incentives for conservation under stochastic returns from competing land uses rapid conversion of private land for agricultural and urban use has raised concern worldwide over the loss of ecological services to inform conservation policy we model privately optimal land use decisions using a real options framework that assumes both the ecological and commercial values of land are stochastic and that land conversion is irreversible we analyze permanent and temporary land conservation policy incentives using this dynamic framework to guide policy makers interested in designing efficient payment mechanisms to achieve ecological preservation goals we find that while the financial cost of temporary policy incentives is generally much lower than permanent policy incentives this difference is very small in scenarios with high discount rates and lower uncertainties in conversion returns and lower expected trend in conservation returns alternately the financial cost of temporary conservation is substantially lower than that of permanent conservation when the expected trend in conservation returns and uncertainties in conservation and conversion returns is high and the discount rate is low comparison with net present value and single source uncertainty models indicates that the presence of a second uncertainty increases the option value of delaying conversion and shows that permanent and temporary policy incentives based on either of the two simpler models can be seriously misguided if multiple uncertainties are present we illustrate the analytical results with a case study of tropical deforestation in indonesia where private landowners can either conserve forests and earn carbon credits or convert to palm oil agriculture and earn profits from the sale of palm oil

the cyclical behaviour of fiscal policy evidence from the oecd this paper addresses the topic of cyclicality in scal policy in particular we show that the level of cyclicality varies across spending categories and across oecd countries in line with leading theories of scal cyclicality we show that countries with volatile output and dispersed political power are the most likely to run procyclical scal policies wage government consumption is highlighted as the most important channel by which these variables affect scal cyclicality

land use and income diversification comparing traditional and colonist populations in the brazilian amazon this article compares and analyzes land use and income diversification among two distinct groups of farmers in the brazilian amazon recent colonists in ouro preto do oeste rondonia and traditional long term residents along the tapajos river para we investigate the hypothesis that farmers who diversify their cash income sources clear less forest on an annual basis and we compare these livelihood choices across colonist and traditional populations in particular we develop a conceptual model based on the household production framework and use econometric models to identify determinants of diversification and forest clearing we find that diversification of agricultural cash crops is negatively correlated with forest clearing by colonists providing limited evidence for the hypothesis other significant covariates of diversification and forest clearing include cash income levels stage in family life cycle cattle ownership and chemical inputs differences in these variables and differences in household response to these variables explain variation in diversification and forest clearing across the two populations

trade policies economic growth and the direct causes of deforestation by ramon lopez gregmar i galinato please send correspondence to ramon lopez 2200 symons hall university of maryland college park md 20742 email rlopez arec umd edu tel 301 405 1281 fax 301 314 9091 gregmar i galinato 2200 symons hall university of maryland college park md 20742 email ggalinato arec umd edu tel 301 405 0477 fax 301 314 9091

virtual land use and agricultural trade estimating environmental and socio economic impacts abstract liberalization has caused an increase in the global trade of goods and services in particular the value and physical volume of agricultural goods traded have largely increased as the environmental and social consequences of trade are complex they are rarely included in the national and international agricultural policies one reason is that there is a lack of concepts and methods for assessing the environmental and social impacts of trade policies in this paper we develop a method for quantifying and assessing the land use hidden in the export and import of agricultural goods for the case of switzerland for our analysis we focus on arable crops the first methodological step of our research illustrates the spatial relationship of switzerland with countries all over the world through the import and export of land use for arable crops the second step links this spatial dimension with a qualitative assessment of the environmental and socio economic impacts of agricultural land use we applied the method to the case of wheat cultivation within switzerland and import to switzerland the major problem we were confronted with was the availability of data which had both to be reliable and available for the countries wheat is imported from the results show that the calculation of land use is credible in spite of the problems related with data availability the assessment results for each indicator are in agreement with the current situation in the respective countries in addition the aggregation seems to accurately reflect the countries agricultural polices the developed method is used to estimate the overall environmental and socio economic impacts of an increase in wheat imports to switzerland we argue that this method could be applied for anticipating potential impacts of trade agreements still further research is required for fine tuning of the utility functions including a weighting procedure in the aggregation procedure for practical applications important aspects like water shortage should enlarge our limited set of indicators in addition the average impact on a country level was assessed to refine that different agricultural systems ranging from intensive to extensive to organic should be considered beyond our scope was to analyze impacts due to other life cycle stages than the agricultural production for informed decision however information on the whole life cycle of agricultural products is required

fiscal crises and aggregate demand can high public debt reverse the effects of fiscal policy abstract this paper shows how the power of fiscal policy to affect consumption can vary depending on the level of public debt at moderate levels of debt fiscal policy has the traditional keynesian effects current generations of consumers discount future taxes because they may not be alive when taxes are raised or there will be a larger population available to pay the taxes but when debt reaches extreme values current generations of consumers know there is a high probability that they will have to pay extra taxes a fiscal deficit can have a contractionary effect in these situations

feasible climate targets the roles of economic growth coalition development and expectations the analysis presented here follows the design specified by the energy modeling forum emf transition scenarios study on achieving climate stabilization goals with delayed participation by developing countries we use the merge model to evaluate the core emf scenarios for both the international and the us specific studies our results indicate that a radiative forcing target equivalent to 450 ppmv co2 e cannot be met even allowing for full participation and overshoot during the entire 21st century with delayed participation of developing countries a target of 550 ppmv co2 e is only attainable with pessimistic assumptions about economic growth and even then only at very high cost a target of 650 ppmv co2 e can be met with delayed participation for a more affordable cost we highlight sensitivities to the core scenarios in two key dimensions i the effect of the unfolding global financial crisis on the rate of economic growth and ii the willingness of initially non participating countries to agree at the beginning of the next commitment period i e 2012 to join the coalition at a pre specified date in the future we find that while the recession does not fundamentally change the crucial role of developing country involvement advance agreement on their part to future targets could substantially reduce costs for all countries

rebound effects in agricultural land and soil management review and analytical framework abstract increasing the efficiency of production is the basis for decoupling economic growth from resource consumption in agriculture more efficient use of natural resources is at the heart of sustainable intensification however technical improvements do not directly translate into resource savings because producers and consumers adapt their behaviour to such improvements often resulting in a rebound effect where part or all of the potential resource savings are offset in extreme cases increases in efficiency may even result in higher instead of lower resource consumption the jevons paradox rebound effects are particularly complex in agricultural land and soil management where multiple resources are used simultaneously and efficiency gains aim to lower the need for farmland water energy nutrients pesticides and greenhouse gas emissions in this context quantification of rebound effects is a prerequisite for generating realistic scenarios of global food provision and for advancing the debate on land sparing versus land sharing however studies that provide an overview of rebound effects related to the resources used in agriculture or guidelines for assessing potential rebound effects from future innovations are lacking this paper contributes to closing this gap by reviewing the current state of knowledge and developing a framework for a structured appraisal of rebound effects as a test case the proposed framework is applied to emerging technologies and practices in agricultural soil management in germany the literature review revealed substantial evidence of rebound effects or even jevons paradox with regard to efficiency increases in land productivity and irrigation water use by contrast there were few studies addressing rebound effects from efficiency increases in fertilizer use pesticide application agricultural energy use and greenhouse gas emissions while rebound effects are by definition caused by behavioural adaptations of humans in agriculture also natural adaptations occur such as resistance of pests to certain pesticides future studies should consider extending the definition of rebound effects to such natural adaptations the test case revealed the potential for direct and indirect economic rebound effects of a number of emerging technologies and practices such as improved irrigation technologies which increase water productivity and may thereby contribute to increases in irrigated areas and total water use the results of this study indicated that rebound effects must be assessed to achieve realistic estimates of resource savings from efficiency improvements and to enable informed policy choices the framework developed in this paper is the first to facilitate such assessments

reservation wages and their labor market effects for black and white male youth this paper presents an empirical analysis of self reported reservation wages for unemployed young black and white males the results show that young blacks seek wages which are comparable to those of young whites in absolute terms but which are higher relative to what is available on the demand side of the market these relatively higher reservation wages of young blacks contribute to their unemployment durations and somewhat to their subsequently received wages changes in reservation wages may thus help to explain the trends in wages and employment of young blacks in recent years

the relationship between unemployment spells and reservation wages as a test of search theory the theory of stationary job search predicts that controlling for other factors that affect the probability of leaving unemployment duration and reservation wages are likely to be positively associated the paper tests this prediction for british cross sectional data from 1982 using an estimating equation implied by search theory simultaneity is crucial in the evaluation of this prediction with single equation and instrumental variable estimates differing markedly perhaps surprisingly given the extreme paucity of both job interviews and offers in the sample the main finding is that reservation wages play a significant role in the determination of duration

amenity benefits and the optimal allocation of land agricultural land often yields sig nificant amenity benefits that may not be re flected in the prevailing allocation of land be tween agricultural and nonagricultural uses this paper introduces a simple supply demand model that incorporates these benefits in the de termination of optimal land allocation three stage least squares and county level data are used to estimate the supply and demand param eters these estimates confirm the plausibility of the conceptual model results from the con tingent valuation literature illustrate the extent of underallocation of land to agriculture due to existing institutional conditions some correc tive measures and their distributional effects are discussed and quantified jel q24

does a recession call for less stringent environmental policy a partial equilibrium second best analysis this paper analyses second best optimal environmental policy responses to real and financial shocks in a two period partial equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms an environmental externality and credit constraints we show that to alleviate credit constraints and encourage investment the second best optimal emission tax falls short of marginal emission damages the optimal response to shocks depends on how the shock affects the size of the environmental and credit market failures and the effectiveness of the tax in alleviating these market failures under mildly restrictive assumptions on functional forms the optimal response to a persistent negative productivity shock or a tightening of credit is to reduce the emission tax our results are informative for how climate change policy should optimally change with the business cycle

search models and applied labor economics individual effects in a nonlinear model explicit treatment of heterogeneity in the empirical job search model this paper extends the empirical version of a job search model to permit heterogeneity in the location of wage offer distributions population variance in wage offers is decomposed into variance due to heterogeneity and variance facing each individual heterogeneity is found to be an important source of offer variance in the population the amount of pure wage offer dispersion facing individuals is found to contribute little to population variance

deforestation land use and property rights empirical evidence from darien panama economic conventional wisdom suggests that providing land users with more secure property rights will result in more sustainable land use and less deforestation in this paper we use spatial econometric techniques to evaluate quantitatively the effect on land use of designated property rights in three parts of darie n province a national park where no human activity is supposed to occur and two reserves for indigenous peoples results suggest that legal property rights for an indigenous population can influence land use geography appears to be more important than legal protection for the national park

are we consuming too much this paper articulates and applies frameworks for examining whether consumption is excessive we consider two criteria for the possible excessiveness or insufficiency of current consumption one is an intertemporal utility maximization criterion actual current consumption is deemed excessive if it is higher than the level of current consumption on the consumption path that maximizes the present discounted value of utility the other is a sustainability criterion which requires that current consumption be consistent with non declining living standards over time we extend previous theoretical approaches by offering a formula for the sustainability criterion that accounts for population growth and technological change in applying this formula we find that some poor regions of the world are failing to meet the sustainability criterion in these regions genuine wealth per capita is falling as investments in human and manufactured capital are not sufficient to offset the depletion of natural capital

fiscal policy in general equilibrium this paper studies four classic fiscal policy experiments within a quantitatively restricted neoclassical model the authors main findings are as follows 1 permanent changes in government purchases can lead to short run and long run output multipliers that exceed one 2 permanent changes in government purchases induce larger effects than temporary changes 3 the financing decision is quantitatively more important than the resource cost of changes in government purchases and 4 public investment has dramatic effects on private output and investment these findings stem from important dynamic interactions of capital and labor absent in earlier equilibrium analyses of fiscal policy copyright 1993 by american economic association

fiscal stabilization policy and fiscal institutions in this paper we analyse counter cyclical fiscal policy within the context of a microfounded analysis of business cycle stabilization we show that tax and spending instruments can have a useful counter cyclical role even after allowing for the distortionary nature of the instruments and the need for debt sustainability a critical barrier to the use of fiscal instruments may be political economy concerns and we survey recent suggestions involving alternative fiscal policy institutions

green growth an assessment green growth is almost tautologically required for global welfare to rise in the long run economic growth is desirable not least because over 1 billion people still live in conditions of poverty undermining the ecological basis for human civilization will damage human welfare and further undermine economic growth there are large adverse environmental externalities from economic activity that affect human welfare directly and indirectly through lower measured output finding ways to tackle these externalities will enhance wellbeing and allow continued growth of gdp while preserving aggregate natural capital however achieving this goal presents societies with major challenges the composition of gdp is likely to have to change significantly with more emphasis on new ideas and less on increased material throughputs the role of the state in a green growth transition will have to go beyond internalizing externalities to get prices right the necessary transformation will be large system wide and structural so the state must also provide at the least overall strategic direction innovation will be central to any successful strategy as will be dealing with the distributional consequences of stronger environmental policies particularly in developing countries organizing the appropriate collective action at the right levels in the face of inadequate information while ensuring that the appropriate governance arrangements are in place will not be easy policy experimentation is needed with more rigorous ex post evaluation and where successful rapid dissemination of the results

choice modelling and its potential application to tropical rainforest preservation abstract loss of rainforest occurs in part because of a global market failure problem markets routinely transmit signals about international demands for forest products such as timber but fail to transmit signals about demands for preservation to make efficient resource allocation choices decision makers need some framework to estimate the non use values that might be held by an international community for rainforest preservation non market valuation techniques can be used for this purpose but framing and other problems limit the application of the contingent valuation method cvm an alternative technique choice modelling cm appears to hold some promise because it can be used to model complex situations and to frame choices consistent with real life choices in this paper a cm experiment to assess the values that australians hold for rainforest conservation in vanuatu is reported the experiment disguises effectively the issue of interest rainforest conservation in vanuatu within a pool of other conservation locations also the experiment demonstrates that choice tradeoffs may involve a variety of environmental and socio economic factors rather than be concentrated on some monetary tradeoff the results demonstrate that a variety of predictive and valuation tools can be gained from a cm experiment and suggest that further development is warranted

explaining forest transitions the role of governance abstract we analyze how governance may influence competing land uses for forests and thus the occurrence of forest transitions across different low and middle income countries we develop a model of competing land uses that allows for governance to impact the risk of future versus current agricultural and forested land allocations the resulting hypothesis on the relationship between governance and the likelihood of a forest transition is then tested using cross country data the empirical analysis offers strong support for the competing land use framework and indicates that rule of law forest policy and regulatory quality influence forest transitions these findings inform not only the ongoing debate on forest transitions but also policy options for managing such transitions in developing economies

planning timber production with evolving prices and costs the traditional faustmann solution to the timber harvesting problem was developed for an environment in which prices costs and technology were constant recent contributions recognizing the evolution of economic institutions have developed solutions to optimal harvesting problems under a variety of more realistic assumptions nautiyal and fowler 1980 show that the socially desirable rotation in a monopolistic situation is longer than that which maximizes the monopolist s present worth but is shorter than the atomistic rotation p 213 heaps and neher 1979 derive the optimal rotation when the rate of harvest is constrained bare and waggener 1980 investigate the value of timberland when timber prices change using a traditional faustmann model murphy fortson and bethune 1977 deal with an imperfect capital market one problem not addressed by recent contributions concerns the violation of the assumption of constant price and cost functions for timber production this assumption clearly does not hold stumpage prices exhibit substantial short run fluctuations and systematic long run trends for southern pine and douglas fir two species that are potential crops for timber plantations historical evidence demonstrates that stumpage prices relative to other price have grown steadily for the period 1913 1978 the ratio of southern pine stumpage price to prices paid by farmers increased at a 4 annual rate while the same ratio for douglas fir increased at an annual rate of 5 7 1 for douglas fir and southern pine forecasts of prices and costs based on his

spite and development in a wide variety of settings spiteful preferences would constitute an obstacle to cooperation trade and thus economic development this paper shows that spiteful preferences the desire to reduce another s material payoff for the mere purpose of increasing one s relative payoff are surprisingly widespread in experiments conducted in one of the least developed regions in india uttar pradesh in a one shot trust game the authors find that a large majority of subjects punish cooperative behavior although such punishment clearly increases inequality and decreases the payoffs of both subjects in experiments to study coordination and to measure social preferences the findings reveal empirical patterns suggesting that the willingness to reduce another s material payoff either for the sake of achieving more equality or for the sake of being ahead is stronger among individuals belonging to high castes than among those belonging to low castes because extreme social hierarchies are typically accompanied by a culture that stresses status seeking it is plausible that the observed social preference patterns are at least partly shaped by this culture thus an exciting question for future research is the extent to which different institutions and cultures produce preferences that are conducive or detrimental to economic development

a model of shifting cultivation can soil conservation reduce deforestation shifting cultivators manage soil not only by adjusting soil use on already cleared lands as in continuous cultivation but also by clearing forests to obtain new fertile soils this study examines the crucial link between on farm soil conservation and deforestation in shifting cultivation by modeling forest clearing as an investment in soil for a private farmer more generally by doing so the study attempts to integrate deforestation and soil conservation models which have been separately developed in the literature our policy goal is to arrest tropical deforestation as destruction of global commons caused by land degradation in shifting cultivation while improving the well being of poor shifting cultivators our integrated approach enables joint policy analyses of deforestation and land degradation three welfare enhancing policies are considered the first is agricultural and nonagricultural subsidies affecting farm and nonfarm income opportunities the second is fiscal and tenure policies affecting discount rates our question is whether the link between forest clearing and soil fertility alters the outcomes of these two standard macroeconomic policies commonly found in the literature the third policy or program is various soil conservation measures affecting soil regeneration and erosivity on already cleared lands this article examines a very important question which has received little attention in previous theoretical works can soil conservation reduce deforestation this study confirms anti deforestation effects of the promotion of nonfarming activities a common and often emphasized finding in previous works among shifting cultivators more importantly it also demonstrates that improving various soil conservation measures not only discourages forest clearing among shifting cultivators but also tends to have greater effects on forest protection than promoting nonfarming activities contrarily agricultural price subsidy or technological progress gives rise to the opposite outcome and lowering the farmer s discount rate or improving tenure security encourages him her to clear more forests just to accumulate soil

the causes of tropical deforestation in ecuador a statistical analysis abstract this paper reports a statistical analysis of the causes of agricultural colonization and land clearing in eastern ecuador the results bolster many of the arguments that have been made about the social forces driving tropical deforestation in general the prospect of capturing agricultural rents stimulates settlement of tree covered hinterlands accordingly the presence of roads and urban centers attracts rural settlement colonists also prefer to go where soils are suitable for crop or livestock production all else remaining the same in addition to being a function of population pressure the extent of land clearing is shown to be a consequence of tenure insecurity these results suggest that institutional reform is needed to encourage conservation of tropical forests

the economics of tropical deforestation this paper provides a survey of first wave economic studies of tropical deforestation and land use these studies of tropical forest land conversion are generally at the cross country level we also conduct a synthesis cross country analysis of tropical agricultural land expansion the results show that agricultural development is the main factor determining land expansion but institutional factors have an important influence income effects tend to vary from region to region and do not always display an environmental kuznets curve relationship copyright 2001 by blackwell publishers ltd

the role of tenure security and private time preference in neotropical deforestation a survey of 209 chimane amerindian households in 18 villages in the bolivian rain forest was done to examine the role of tenure security and private time preference on the clearance of old growth forest results of tobit regressions suggest that conflict with abutters was associated with more deforestation but the average impatience of the household heads was associated with less deforestation results suggest that governments should protect the land rights of indigenous people if they wish to enhance conservation results cast doubts on the idea that high private time preference increases the depletion of natural resources

deforestation and agricultural productivity in the cote d ivoire an optimal control model is used to determine the optimal steady state forest stock in the cote d ivoire this stock is shown to increase with increases in the forestry returns relative to those in agriculture technological progress in agriculture and increases in the social discount rate serve to lower the optimal steady state forest stock based on an estimated aggregate yield function the optimal forest stock is shown to be most sensitive to changes in the social rate of discount assuming current 1985 technology deforestation appears socially optimal only for values of the discount rate greater than 8

social capital one or many definition and measurement three families of social capital concepts are discussed fa1 trust fa2 ease of cooperation and fa3 network in the language of game theory social capital is the excess propensity to play cooperative solutions in prisoners dilemma games the three families lead to different definitions and thus to different measurement methods some measures are theory near while others are easy to use proxies it is shown that all definitions and measures are related the social capital dream is that all definitions try to catch aspects of the same phenomenon so that all measures tap the same latent variable it is discussed whether this dream is likely to come true

consequences of environmental tax reform for involuntary unemployment and welfare we investigate the welfare effects of environmental tax reform i e raising environmental taxes and using the proceeds to reduce distortionary taxes on labour the framework of analysis is a small open economy with involuntary unemployment due to a rigid consumer wage environmental tax reform boosts not only environmental quality but also employment if substitution between labour and resources is easy the production share of the fixed factor is large and the initial tax rates on resources and profits are small if the initial tax system is sub optimal with a negligible tax on resources profits rise as well