pollution without subsidy what is the environmental performance index overlooking abstract agriculture is heavily subsidized in most organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries and environmental externalities can occur due to pollution caused by protectionist policies this study examines the structure of agricultural protection in oecd countries from a chronological and comparative perspective in addition the policy environment interaction is scrutinized to better explain the environmental implications of agricultural policies in the era of globalization this paper critically evaluates the environmental performance index and recommends that this index includes polluting inputs in future calculations

economic dynasties with intermissions we consider a model of successive generations with a fixed proportion of selfish and altruistic members in each individual s offspring in contrast with the others selfish members bequeath nothing to their own children we assume that parents cannot recognize their heirs types and that negative bequests are forbidden we study markov perfect equilibria of this multistage game of incomplete information and their implications for wealth distribution

the environment and welfare implications of trade and tax policy developing countries with comparative advantage in dirty industries face the risk of environmental degradation unless appropriate policies are implemented using applied general equilibrium analysis we examine how trade influences the environment and assess the welfare and environmental implications of alternative pollution abatement policies for indonesia our results indicate that unilateral trade liberalization by indonesia would increase the ratio of emission levels to real output for almost all major pollution categories more importantly when tariff removal is combined with a cost effective tax policy the twin objectives of welfare enhancement and environmental quality improvement appear to be feasible this sheds new and positive light on the role of trade in sustainable development

the demand for and impact of learning hiv status this paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their hiv results after being tested distance to the hiv results centers was also randomly assigned without any incentive 34 percent of the participants learned their hiv results however even the smallest incentive doubled that share using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of hiv status sexually active hiv positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active hiv positive individuals who did not learn their results however hiv positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not there is no significant effect of learning hiv negative status on the purchase of condoms

predatory versus productive government the case of u s agricultural policies this essay will argue that agricultural policy in the united states has led to both the enhancement of efficiency through productive policies and the transfer of wealth and income to special interests through redistributive or predatory policies these two activities can be labeled as pests and perts pest policies or political economic seeking transfers are meant to redistribute wealth from one social group to another and are not explicitly concerned with efficiency in contrast perts or political economic resource transactions are intended to correct market failures or to provide public goods these policies have neutral distributional effects at least in design a review of the history of public policy in agriculture reveals not only tension between the pert and pest roles of the public sector but also some coordination between these two types of activities as different interest groups pressure the political process the government trades off pests and perts in its attempts to acquire balance and secure political power at times this has led to combinations of programs that appear incoherent in such a world the challenge for economists is to design and advocate policies that are both economically productive and politically sustainable

is trade good or bad for the environment sorting out the causality we seek to contribute to the debate over globalization and the environment by asking what is the effect of trade on a country s environment for a given level of gdp we take specific account of the endogeneity of trade using exogenous geographic determinants of trade as instrumental variables we find that trade tends to reduce three measures of air pollution statistical significance is high for concentrations of so2 moderate for no2 and lacking for particulate matter although results for other environmental measures are not as encouraging there is little evidence that trade has a detrimental effect on the environment

sectoral implications of farm program modifications the overall and distributional effects of farm programs and selected revisions are examined using a mathematical programming sector model the model incorporates market distortions caused by price supports target prices program participation deficiency payments and marketing loans current farm programs are found to increase producer prices depress consumer prices and in turn result in excess production and higher consumption and exports domestic and foreign consumers as well as domestic producers are subsidized by farm programs social deadweight loss occurs as government payments exceed welfare benefits received by consumers and producers society as a whole benefits from reductions in program provisions

the distribution of wealth with imperfect altruism abstract in this paper we study the distribution of wealth in an economy with infinitely lived families individual generations of each family may or may not be altruistic this is represented as a preference shock which follows a first order markov process within each family a feature representingimperfect altruism altruistic individuals care about the welfare of their children and are likely to leave bequests selfish ones do not this results in a non trivial distribution of wealth among families at any point in time we study an economy with a risk free linear production technology and show that a stationary distribution of wealth exists this distribution is discrete and approximates the pareto distribution under additional restrictions we also characterize conditions on the production technology which yields perpetual growth with increasing inequality journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d31 d91 e21

the toxic intensity of industrial production global patterns trends and trade policy this paper exploits a newly developed data set to investigate recent changes in the international distribution of industrial pollution in particular the authors examine three issues 1 the relationship between the toxic intensity of industrial production and the level of economic development 2 the impact of oecd environmental regulation on global changes in toxic intensity and 3 the relationship between trade policy and the toxic intensity of industrial production in ldc s 10 refs

what mean impacts miss distributional effects of welfare reform experiments labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings transfers and income yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts we investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random assignment data from connecticut s jobs first waiver which features key elements of post 1996 welfare programs estimated quantile treatment effects exhibit the substantial heterogeneity predicted by labor supply theory thus mean impacts miss a great deal looking separately at samples of dropouts and other women does not improve the performance of mean impacts we conclude that welfare reform s effects are likely both more varied and more extensive than has been recognized

evaluation of the subjective probabilities of survival in the health and retirement study in the health and retirement study respondents were asked about the chances they would live to 75 or to 85 we analyze these responses to determine if they behave like probabilities of survival if their averages are close to average probabilities in the population and if they have correlations with other variables that are similar to correlations with actual mortality outcomes we find that generally they do behave like probabilities and that they do aggregate to population probabilities most remarkable however is that they covary with other variables in the same way actual outcomes vary with the variables for example respondents with higher socioeconomic status give higher probabilities of survival whereas respondents who smoke give lower probabilities we conclude that these measures of subjective probabilities have great potential use in models of intertemporal decision making under uncertainty

environmental kuznets curves real progress or passing the buck abstract recent research has examined the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc the notion that environmental impact increases in the early stages of development followed by declines in the later stages these studies have focused on the relationship between per capita income and a variety of environmental indicators results imply that ekcs may exist for a number of cases however the measures of environmental impact used generally focus on production processes and reflect environmental impacts that are local in nature and for which abatement is relatively inexpensive in terms of monetary costs and or lifestyle changes significantly more consumption based measures such co2 emissions and municipal waste for which impacts are relatively easy to externalize or costly to control show no tendency to decline with increasing per capita income by considering consumption and trade patterns the author re examines the concept of the ekc and proposes the use of alternative consumption based measures of environmental impact the author speculates that what appear to be improvements in environmental quality may in reality be indicators of increased ability of consumers in wealthy nations to distance themselves from the environmental degradation associated with their consumption

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

forest resource trade between japan and southeast asia the structure of dual decay abstract forest resource trade between southeast asia and japan has been noteworthy because of its documented effects on the deforestation of southeast asia s environment this paper expands the focus of this issue to include an examination of the effects of this trade on japanese domestic forests our goal is to redefine the scope of discussions of trade environment issues we assert that the environmental problems of the importer and the exporter can be understood as a set of structurally connected phenomena which we refer to as dual decay we examine the underlying dynamics of renewable resource trade and the effects of trade liberalization on both importers and exporters environments

free trade and the environment development system abstract we develop a simulation model to analyze the trade environment development system that contains a number of important advances over the earlier and current theoretical models our model like other models has an income induced pollution policy allows country factor endowments to influence trade patterns and allows production factors to be mobile intersectorally unlike other theoretical models our model treats pollution stemming from both production and consumption in a way that does justice to empirical observations we model pollution policy explicitly as an abatement investment thus effectively allowing for differences in pollution intensive technology across countries in addition we allow for an internationally traded intermediate good a natural resource as a result of this novel approach we find that 1 the benefits of trade i can be either positive or negative and ii depend on country endowments and 2 the pollution effects of trade are closely tied to the benefits of trade our model generally shows higher pollution levels under free trade than autarky however our results do not support the pollution haven hypothesis i e trade causes less pollution in developed countries and more pollution in developing ones some developing countries produce more of the pollution intensive good but ultimately consume less pollution under autarky because they have higher per capita income and thus invest more heavily in environmental upgrading under autarky

what is the price of prevention new evidence from a field experiment how does increasing access to treatment affect the demand for preventive testing in this paper we present results from a field experiment in nigeria in which we offered cervical cancer screening to women at randomly chosen prices to test our hypothesis we also offered women a lottery where the payoff was a subsidy towards the cost of cervical cancer treatment conditional upon a diagnosis of cervical cancer we find that women randomly selected to receive the conditional cancer treatment subsidy were about 4 percentage points more likely to take up screening than those in the control group we also show that reducing the price of screening by 10 cents increased take up by about 1 percentage point these results offer compelling evidence that the optimal set of subsidies to increase take up of preventive testing in developing countries must include subsidies towards treatment costs in addition to price subsidies

can higher prices stimulate product use evidence from a field experiment in zambia the controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests in part on whether higher prices can increase use either by targeting distribution to high use households a screening effect or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk cost effect we develop a methodology for separating these two effects we implement the methodology in a field experiment in zambia using door to door marketing of a home water purification solution we find evidence of economically important screening effects by contrast we find no consistent evidence of sunk cost effects jel c93 d12 i11 m31 o12

making the most out of programme evaluations and social experiments accounting for heterogeneity in programme impacts the conventional approach to social programme evaluation focuses on estimating mean impacts of programmes yet many interesting questions regarding the political economy of programmes the distribution of programme benefits and the option values conferred on programme participants require knowledge of the distribution of impacts or features of it this paper presents evidence that heterogeneity in response to programmes is empirically important and that classical probability inequalities are not very informative in producing estimates or bounds on the distribution of programme impacts we explore two methods for supplementing the information in these inequalities based on assumptions about participant decision making processes and about the strength in dependence between outcomes in the participation and non participation states dependence is produced as a consequence of rational choice by participants we test for stochastic rationality among programme participants and present and implement methods for estimating the option values of social programmes

economic incentives for environmental protection integrating theory and practice for decades economists have been extolling the virtues of market based or economic incentive approaches to environmental protection some 70 years ago arthur cecil pigou 1920 suggested corrective taxes to discourage activities that generate externalities a half century later j dales 1968 showed how the introduction of transferable property rights could work to promote environmental protection at lower aggregate cost than conventional standards from these two seminal ideas corrective taxes and transferable property rights a substantial body of research has developed both environmental taxes and marketable permits are coming of age in the policy arena examples include the introduction of marketable permits in the united states to control acid rain the use of changes in europe to limit air and water pollution and the employment of deposit refund schemes for products ranging from beverage containers to batteries the introduction of these tools on a large scale provides a unique opportunity to extend the frontiers of knowledge this essay strives to identify prominent issues that merit investigation 8 refs

the effect of agricultural policies on land use and environmental quality in this paper i consider the environmental quality gains that may be achieved by reducing agricultural income supports a new methodology is developed to estimate land use shares in an application to wisconsin milk price support reductions result in shifts of marginal agricultural land to forest reducing soil erosion and providing off site water quality improvements the environmental benefits are estimated to be at least as large as the decreased welfare burden on consumers and taxpayers indicating a central role for environmental quality considerations in motivating policy reforms and a more efficient means of achieving the environmental quality goals of land retirement programs

consumption based accounting and the trade carbon emissions nexus abstract this paper considers a recently developed consumption based carbon emissions database from which emissions calculations are made based on the domestic use of fossil fuels plus the embodied emissions from imports minus exports to test directly for the importance of trade in national emissions comparing such consumption based emissions data to conventionally measured territory based emissions data produces several useful conclusions for example most countries are net importers of carbon emissions their consumption based emissions are higher than their territory based emissions also while low and high income countries tend to have the largest ratios of consumption based emissions to territory based emissions the majority of middle income countries have ratios greater than one as well furthermore china alone is responsible for over half the global outflows of carbon via trade the econometric estimations which were robust across income levels determined that i trade was significant for consumption based emissions but not for territory based emissions ii exports and imports offset each other so that exports lower consumption based emissions whereas imports increase them and iii the fossil fuel content of a country s energy mix is more important likely significantly so for territory based emissions than for consumption based emissions and iv domestic fossil fuel prices oil gasoline had a negative impact on territory based emissions but were insignificant for consumption based emissions hence there is a wedge between i the emissions a country is responsible for consumption based emissions and ii the emissions that a country s domestic policies affect territory based emissions so countries should have both an interest and a responsibility to help lower the carbon intensity of energy in countries that are particularly important for global carbon transfers china and india

the illusion of sustainability this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the illusion of sustainability conducted during the time period 1998 to 2001 in kenya the study observed that deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission people were less likely to take deworming if their direct first order or indirect second order social contacts were exposed to deworming the introduction of a small fee for deworming drugs led to an 80 percent reduction in treatment rates take up was not sensitive to the exact price level suggesting that it is particularly counter productive to charge small positive prices for the treatment of infectious diseases an intensive school health education had no impact on worm prevention funding for the study derived from world bank nih fogarty international center berkeley center for health research

the demand for preventive medical care the idea that people invest in health capital is an essential part of models of the demand for health but the investment motives behind health decision are often obscured by other factors this empirical paper investigates the demand for adult preventive medical care where the investment motives are relatively clear cut several important results demonstrate the usefulness of the approach first the analysis finds that annual use of two preventive services decreases with age although not the only plausible explanation the results are consistent with individuals shortens over the lifecycle second schooling is found to be an important determinant of demand with the more educated much more likely to use the services neither lifecycle nor schooling effects are consistently found in studies of the demand for culture care finally the empirical analysis also provides additional evidence on the responsiveness of the demand for preventive care to change in insurance coverage an important issue for heal

basic attributes of trade and environment what do the numbers tell us abstract this paper analyzes 79 categorical case studies in trade and the environment to determine basic attributes of the field it intends to describe these attributes organized into four intellectual clusters in order to set some basic standards for measuring trends and making initial quantitative generalizations about policy in the trade and environment field this general review and categorization is a necessary step in the development of any field of study and absolutely critical to building a basis for cumulative research and advancement of knowledge the findings suggest that the data mirror general beliefs about trade and environment with respect to the types of problems actors involved remedies industries and other key attributes notably the findings highlight the difference between process and product in environmental cases and the relation between rich and poor countries in trade and environment issues

double dividend with trade distortions analytical results and evidence from chile abstract the double dividend debate evolves around the possibility or not of substituting environmental taxes for more distortionary taxes to reduce both pollution degradation and or damages the first dividend and the excess burden of existing taxes the second dividend without eroding tax revenues this paper contributes to the double dividend debate with a formal analysis and some numerical evidence emphasizing trade and environmental distortions the substitution of environmental taxes for trade distortions has been neglected in the double dividend debate which has centered on labor market distortions conditions for the existence of a double dividend are derived for different characterizations of preferences and policy menus we empirically explore the trade environment double dividend with an applied general equilibrium model of the chilean economy the model includes many distortions and a vector of six air pollution effluents their health incidences and associated damages which are assumed nonseparable from market goods findings suggest solid evidence of a trade environment double dividend in the case of chile swapping environmental taxes for trade distortions improves welfare the swap would even pay for itself under the assumption of separable pollution damages from market good consumption

trade the pollution haven hypothesis and the environmental kuznets curve examining the linkages abstract this paper examines the extent to which the ekc inverted u relationship can be explained by trade and specifically the migration or displacement of dirty industries from the developed regions to the developing regions the pollution haven hypothesis phh using detailed data on north south trade flows for pollution intensive products the evidence for the phh is assessed emissions of 10 air and water pollutants are then estimated controlling for trade openness structural change and dirty north south trade flows evidence of pollution haven effects is found although such effects do not appear to be widespread and appear to be relatively small compared to the roles played other explanatory variables

joint trade liberalization and tax reform in a small open economy the case of egypt abstract we develop a cge model of the egyptian economy to analyze the impact of various trade liberalization scenarios allowing distortionary domestic taxes to vary endogenously in order to satisfy a fixed real government revenue target we decompose computed welfare gains into effects from tax reform trade reform and their interaction scenarios include removal or unification of the consumption tax capital tax or both and tariff unification a free trade agreement with the european union and unilateral tariff elimination welfare effects depend critically on the type of revenue replacement tax while both are important neither trade policy reform nor tax reform dominates

trade and the environment from a southern perspective the relationship between free trade and the environment is one of the main issues of contention between environmental and ecological economics environmental economics assumes a positive relationship between free trade economic growth and environmental policies environmental externalities may cause important damage however trade is not to be blamed for this instead the fault lies with policy inadequacies at the national level on the other hand some ecological economists criticise the assumptions of environmental economics especially the immobility of production factors and the positive correlation between income and environmental quality they plead for measures to prevent deterioration of northern environmental standards in a race to the bottom due to ecological dumping from the south in this paper we argue that neither environmental economics nor northern ecological economics take into account the structural conditions determining the international trade system based on some new empirical evidence on material flows we stress the notion of environmental cost shifting if physical and political ecology perspectives are adopted a southern approach to the trade and environment issue may arise 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

understanding farmland price changes this paper develops a structural model of land prices which includes the multidimensional effects of inflation on capital erosion savings return erosion and real debt reduction as well as the effect of changes in the opportunity cost of capital the results show that inflation and changes in the real returns on capital are major explanatory factors in farmland price swings in addition to returns to farming additionally the effects of credit market constraints and expectations schemes are considered explicitly in the analytical model

climate change mitigation and agricultural development models primary commodity exports or local consumption production abstract the increasing demand for agricultural products partly due to the high population growth requires agriculture to struggle for productivity improvement however productivity search is constrained by environmental preoccupations raising the question of agricultural development models to be adopted to increase productivity while limiting environmental consequences this paper examines the role of market orientation by assessing the effect of agricultural commodity export on greenhouse gas emissions relatively to local market oriented agricultural production model using panel data from 1986 to 2010 for 136 countries around the world and accurate instrumental variables technique the findings suggest that the proportion of primary commodity export in agricultural production increases greenhouse gas emissions these results are robust to different sources of agricultural export and environmental data and to the inclusion of additional control variables

the dynamic impact of renewable energy consumption on co2 emissions a revisited environmental kuznets curve approach this paper considers a revisited environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis with potential impact of renewable energy consumption on environmental quality to this end paper aims at investigating the validity of the ekc hypothesis employing the dependent variable of co2 emissions and regressors of gdp quadratic gdp and renewable energy consumption this paper hence analyzes this revisited ekc hypothesis to observe if i there exists an inverted u shaped relationship between environmental quality in terms of co2 emissions per capita income and per capita income squared and ii there exists a negative causality from renewables to co2 emissions within ekc model paper employs a panel data set of 17 oecd countries over the period 1977 2010 and launches panel fmols and panel dols estimations the findings support the ekc hypothesis for the panel and indicate that gdp per capita and gdp per capita squared have the impacts on co2 emissions positively and negatively respectively and that renewable energy consumption yields negative impact on co2 emissions another remark of this paper is that the validity of ekc does not depend on income level of individual countries of panel in which ekc hypothesis holds eventually paper argues that if countries carry out i policies i e for fair and easy access to the electricity from renewable sources and ii policies to increase renewables supply through i e improved renewable energy technologies they will be able to contribute to combating global warming problem as they increase their gdp s

international trade in carbon emission rights and basic materials general equilibrium calculations for 2020 restrictions on co emissions affect international trade and the pattern of comparative advantage this paper based on calculations with a static general equilibrium model suggests that international trade in carbon rights is a substitute for trade in energy intensive goods and thus international trading in carbon rights reduces sectoral effects of emission reductions in our model we surprisingly find that free riding by non signatory countries may not render unilateral action ineffective if the oecd unilaterally cuts global emissions by 5 per cent from 1990 levels by the year 2020 emissions by non oecd regions increase but offset less than 15 per cent of this cutback moreover carbon taxes depress international oil prices and create incentives for increased tradc in natural gas

the interface between growth trade pollution and natural resource use in chile evidence from an economywide model abstract we investigate the implications of trade liberalization and pollution taxes on aggregate income pollution and natural resource use in chile with a neoclassical economywide model comprising 75 sectors the model incorporates 13 measures of pollution effluents which are linked to the use of polluting inputs and energy use we estimate the economic and environmental impact of chile s participation in nafta mercosur of unilateral trade liberalization and effluent taxes unilateral trade liberalization induces substantial worsening of pollution emissions and expansion of resource based sectors partly because of access to cheaper energy nafta integration is environmentally benign in terms of pollution emissions

learning from others hiv testing updating beliefs and responding to risk extending the seminal work of von neumann and morgenstern 1944 savage 1954 advanced a theory that allows decision makers to maximize expected utility based on subjective probabilities of different states when objective probabilities are unknown since then an extensive theoretical and empirical literature has explored how beliefs are formed or updated and how they affect behavior dominitz and manski 1997 manski 2004 one line of research has studied subjective beliefs in the context of testing and learning results for a variety of health conditions such as huntington s disease cervical cancer and breast cancer oster shoulson and dorsey 2013 okeke adepiti and ajenifuja 2013 and lange 2011 among others in this context receiving a diagnosis provides objective information that individuals can use to make decisions optimizing for the future in contrast to noncommunicable diseases some diseases such as hiv allow for behavioral responses to testing that can affect the spread of the disease in this paper we examine how beliefs and behavior are affected by hiv testing in rural malawi we extend the existing literature by studying the impact of others testing on

psychological expected utility theory and anticipatory feelings we extend expected utility theory to situations in which agents experience feelings of anticipation prior to the resolution of uncertainty we show how these anticipatory feelings may result in time inconsistency we provide an example from portfolio theory to illustrate the potential impact of anticipation on asset prices

carbon emissions control and trade liberalization coordinated approaches to taiwan s trade and tax policy abstract in recent years several studies have emerged on the possible reconciliation between trade and environmental policies however little attention has been devoted to inquiring about the economic implications of the linkages of these policies in the newly industrialized countries the so called nics in this paper we investigate the joint effects of trade and environmental policies on the taiwan economy the estimates are derived from a five household 18 sector computable general equilibrium model calibrated to a 1995 social accounting matrix our empirical results based on taiwan s data show that tariff elimination can significantly reduce the costs of carbon emissions control and possibly offset welfare reductions due to implementation of a carbon tax our findings reveal that the coordination of trade liberalization with the introduction of targeted environmental policies enhances factor relocation towards competitive industries they are broadly consistent with those cases of developing countries reported in previous studies

does price affect the demand for information about new health technologies evidence from a field experiment in nigeria we study how prices influence the demand for information about a new preventative health technology we conducted a field experiment in nigeria where women were offered the opportunity to get screened for cervical cancer at baseline 2 3 of women had no knowledge of cervical cancer screening field staff made house calls to give women information about the test and also distributed vouchers that randomly varied the price of screening at the point of service we find an inverse u shaped relationship between prices and the demand for information going from zero to a small positive price increased the demand for information about the test but increasing the price further by 100 resulted in a net decrease in the demand for information we argue that these results have interesting implications for the debate about the pricing of new health technologies in developing countries

cross border pollution terms of trade and welfare we construct a two good general equilibrium model of international trade for two small open economies where pollution from production is transmitted across borders governments in both countries impose emission taxes non cooperatively within this framework we examine the effect of changes in the degree of cross border pollution on nash emission taxes emission levels and welfare we do so under two scenarios when changes in cross border pollution do not affect domestic pollution non strategic and when they do strategic we also examine the effect of changes in international terms of trade on pollution and welfare when cross border pollution is non strategic

free distribution or cost sharing evidence from a randomized malaria prevention experiment author s cohen jessica dupas pascaline abstract it is often argued that cost sharing charging a subsidized positive price for a health product is necessary to avoid wasting resources on those who will not use or do not need the product we explore this argument through a field experiment in kenya in which we randomized the price at which prenatal clinics could sell long lasting anti malarial insecticide treated nets itns to pregnant women we find no evidence that costsharing reduces wastage on those that will not use the product women who received free itns are not less likely to use them than those who paid subsidized positive prices we also find no evidence that costsharing induces selection of women who need the net more those who pay higher prices appear no sicker than the average prenatal client in the area in terms of measured anemia an important indicator of malaria cost sharing does however considerably dampen demand we find that uptake drops by 75 percent when the price of itns increases from zero to 0 75 i e from 100 to 87 5 percent subsidy the price at which itns are currently sold to pregnant women in kenya we combine our estimates in a cost effectiveness analysis of itn prices on child mortality that incorporates both private and social returns to itn usage overall our results suggest that free distribution of itns could save many more lives than cost sharing programs have achieved so far and given the large positive externality associated with widespread usage of itns it would likely do so at a lesser cost per life saved

heterogeneous dynasties and the political economy of public debt we consider a small open overlapping generations economy with descending altruism heterogeneity is introduced by assuming that each parent procreates a fixed proportion of selfish children altruistic parents can recognize the type of each child there is no ricardian equivalence and an active public intergenerational transfer policy is attractive to altruistic dynasty members although there may be no unanimity among them we display reasonable conditions for indirect preferences to be single peaked and we apply the median voter theorem we then describe political equilibrium paths and discuss their compatibility with the steady path of an underlying closed economy with autonomous labor productivity growth

capital income taxation when inherited wealth is not observable this paper extends the atkinson stiglitz model of direct and indirect taxation to a dynamic setting with two unobservable characteristics productive ability and inherited wealth bequests are motivated by the joy of giving a child s inheritance is a random variable with a probability distribution that depends on his parent s investment in a bequest technology public borrowing is assumed and implies the modified golden rule we study the optimal tax policy when two instruments are available a non linear wage income tax and a proportional tax on capital income we show that the second instrument ought in general to be used but that the tax rate is not necessarily positive however a positive tax rate is more likely when there is a positive correlation between inherited wealth and innate ability

impacts of tariff escalation on the environment literature review and synthesis abstract writers on trade and environment often claim that tariff escalation harms the environment it skews exports toward raw materials and away from processed goods so to the extent that primary production degrades the environment more than processing it will harm exporting countries this paper reviews the literature on tariff escalation and the environment focusing on 1 a impact of escalating tariffs on the allocation of production and processing between exporters and importers 2 b comparison of the environmental impacts of primary production and processing 3 c impact of increased income from removing tariff escalation on environmental protection expenditures 4 d environmental impact of decreased transport of freight it concludes that tariff escalation is not likely to be a significant source either of economic distortion or of environmental harm

revisiting the environmental kuznets curve in a global economy the present study deals with an empirical investigation between co2 emissions energy intensity economic growth and globalization using annual data over the period of 1970 2010 for turkish economy we applied unit root test and cointegration approach in the presence of structural breaks the direction of causality between the variables is investigated by applying the vecm granger causality approach our results confirmed the existence of cointegration between the series the empirical evidence reported that energy intensity and economic growth globalization increase condense co2 emissions the results also validated the presence of environmental kuznets curve ekc the causality analysis shows bidirectional causality between economic growth and co2 emissions this implies that economic growth can be boosted at the cost of environment

unintended impacts of public investments on private decisions the depletion of forested wetlands by affecting relative economic returns infrastructure investments can induce major changes in private land use the authors find that 30 percent of forested wetland depletion in the mississippi valley has resulted from private decisions induced by federal flood control projects despite explicit federal policy to preserve wetlands the model aggregates individual land use decisions using a parametric distribution of unobserved land quality dynamic simulations are used to quantify the impacts on wetlands of federal projects and other factors copyright 1990 by american economic association