pest externalities from agricultural inputs agricultural inputs such as water pesticide and even time may have the unintended effect of stimulating some pest populations leading to crop losses a conceptual model is developed to contrast optimal use of pesticide and nonpesticide inputs with myopic use patterns which ignore pest externalities under most conditions optimal management is found to entail reduced input levels these issues are illustrated for imperial valley cotton using biological simulation correct calculation of the relative profitability of conventional and integrated pest management techniques such as a shortened growing season are found to depend crucially on whether pest externalities are taken into account

a dynamic approach to the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis states that pollution levels increase as a country develops but begin to decrease as rising incomes pass beyond a turning point in ekc analyses the relationship between environmental degradation and income is usually expressed as a quadratic function with the turning point occurring at a maximum pollution level other explanatory variables have been included in these models but income regularly has had the most significant effect on indicators of environmental quality one variable consistently omitted in these relationships is the price of energy this paper analyzes previous models to illustrate the importance of prices in these models and then includes prices in an econometric ekc framework testing energy income and co2 income relationships these long run price income models find that income is no longer the most relevant indicator of environmental quality or energy demand indeed we find no significant evidence for the existence of an ekc within the range of current incomes for energy in the presence of price and trade variables

the income elasticity of non point source air pollutants revisiting the environmental kuznets curve abstract this paper examines the income pollution relationship for three non point source pollutants in 1990 ambient concentrations reported at monitors throughout the us are regressed on median household income and other socio economic variables for the census tracts in which the monitors were located contrary to earlier studies a u shaped relationship is obtained

investing in farmers the impacts of farmer field schools in relation to integrated pest management public policy in developing countries has failed to invest in educating farmers on how to deal with variable agro ecosystems and a changing world here we present an assessment of a participatory training approach in changing crop protection by farmers from chemically dependent to more sustainable practices in line with the tenets of integrated pest management ipm we review the evidence from the studies on an educational investment designed to capacitate farmers to apply ipm and discuss these data in the light of an on going policy debate concerning cost effectiveness the results indicate substantial immediate and developmental benefits of participation in farmer field schools

limit cycles under a negative effect of pollution on consumption demand the role of an environmental kuznets curve since heal explorations in natural resource economics the johns hopkins university press for resources for the future baltimore 1982 there is a theoretical consensus about the occurrence of limit cycles through a hopf bifurcation under a positive effect of pollution on consumption demand compensation effect and about the impossibility under a negative effect distaste effect however recent empirical evidence advocates for the relevance of distaste effects our paper challenges the conventional view on the theoretical ground and reconciles theory and evidence the environmental kuznets curve ekc pollution first increases in the capital level then decreases plays the main role indeed the standard case a la heal limit cycles only under a compensation effect only works along the upward sloping branch of the curve while the opposite limit cycles only under a distaste effect holds along the downward sloping branch welfare effects of taxation also change according to the slope of the ekc

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

on environmental kuznets curves arising from stock externalities abstract we develop a stock externality model in an optimal growth framework and examine the relationship between economic growth and the environment we find that as incomes rise over the growth path both the marginal benefits of pollution control and the marginal costs of pollution control rise if at a given income level the marginal benefits rise more than the marginal costs the emissions income relationship has a negative slope at that income level and vice versa we are thus able to generate examples of emissions income relationships of varying shapes by varying pollution specific parameters which determine marginal costs and benefits such as the convexity of the cost function the rate of decay of the stock of pollution and the share of consumption in the composite good an inverted u shape relationship an environmental kuznets curve requires only minimal assumptions a convex cost function and that environmental quality is a normal good imply an inverted u shape relationship for an open set of parameters we also examine how environment income relationship varies according to what measure is used for the environment emissions stock of pollution or emissions control

economic growth and emissions reconsidering the empirical basis of environmental kuznets curves abstract recent empirical research indicates that certain types of emissions follow an inverted u or environmental kuznets curve ekc as income grows this regularity has been interpreted as a possible de linking of economic growth and patterns of certain pollutants for developed economies in this paper the empirical basis of this result is investigated by considering some statistical particularities of the various ekc studies performed it is argued that the inverted u relationship between income and emissions estimated from panel data need not hold for specific individual countries over time based on insights from intensity of use analysis in resource economics an alternative growth model is specified and estimated for three types of emissions co2 nox and so2 in four countries netherlands uk usa and western germany it is found that the time patterns of these emissions correlate positively with economic growth and that emission reductions may have been achieved as a result of structural and technological changes in the economy sustainable growth is defined as the rate of economic growth that does not lead to growth in emissions its rate is calculated for each type of emission and country based on estimated parameter values the resulting indicators reflect a balance between the positive influence of growth and negative influence of structural change and technological progress on emission levels

precaution and liquidity in the demand for housing we exploit cross sectional mortgage data to investigate the importance of liquidity constraints and a precautionary motive in the demand for housing households that are not liquidity constrained consume housing services essentially as the life cycle hypothesis suggests but with a significant precautionary component households that are liquidity constrained in terms of not meeting standard loan to value or payments to income constraints are similar to unconstrained households in most respects including the precautionary motive but they respond somewhat less to fluctuations in their lifetime income suggesting some influence of bank induced liquidity constraints we additionally find however that banks enforce liquidity constraints only weakly jel d91 d12 r21 i introduction the benchmark theory in the economics of consumption is the life cycle or permanent income hypothesis lcpi based on the work of modigliani and brumberg 1954 and friedman 1957 its empirical validity is sometimes questionable especially when compared against alternatives that incorporate liquidity constraints or the precautionary motive for saving see for instance deaton 1992 for a survey rejection of the lcpi may however be just a manifestation of the poor quality of consumption data at the micro level these data are typically subject to the reporting biases and omissions inherent in consumer surveys there are further difficulties in measuring a desired stream of consumption services nondurable consumption goods are a small fraction of total consumption and in the case of food essentials hardly a consumer choice variable durable consumption goods have the feature that they are lumpy and that the consumption services at any point in time are hard to measure we propose to test the lcpi at the micro level with a quite different type of data the data are obtained from the residential mortgage finance database collected by the national association of realtors they are based on actual home purchases and the associated mortgage transactions reported by realtors and thus avoid some of the reporting biases of the consumer surveys more important they allow us to accurately identify households that in principle have instantaneous access to additional liquidity by lowering the down payment for the house purchase or increasing the size of the loan further the purchase of a house provides an accurate measure of a relatively large fraction of consumption services obtained for a medium to long horizon and measured at the time of the consumption decision although our data also have some serious shortcomings they allow a look at the lcpi from an unconventional vantage point perhaps the most influential study employing the standard consumer survey in testing the lcpi at the micro level is that of hall and mishkin 1982 it examines food expenditure from the panel study of income dynamics one of their key results is that consumption tracks income more closely than would be expected under the lcpi they demonstrate that this result could be explained by assuming a group of liquidity constrained consumers consuming their income at each point in time of 20 of the total sample some of the drawbacks of this study are the use of food expenditures to represent consumption the underreporting of income and absence of proper wealth data inherent in the consumer survey and the associated inability to individually separate liquidity constrained consumers from the rest of the sample several previous studies have attempted to improve on this way of testing the lcpi by examining other data sets bernanke 1984 used data on durable consumption goods automobiles to overcome the drawbacks of using food consumption in the hall and mishkin study his results support the lcpi but are still suspect because of possible reporting biases and the lack of good wealth and savings observations

transboundary externalities in the environmental transition hypothesis the environmental kuznets curve ekc is a hypothesis which implies that it is possible to grow out of environmental degradation most theoretical models of the ekc relation have not accounted for transboundary and intergenerational externalities nor have empirical studies provided evidence that validates an inverted u shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth for pollution problems where the effects are far displaced or are long delayed

an empirical investigation of the pollution haven effect with strategic environment and trade policy abstract using a new dataset on the stringency and enforcement of environmental policy this study is the first to find robust confirmation of a pollution haven effect in a cross country context by accounting for strategically determined environment trade and intellectual property right ipr policies a simple game theoretic approach to policy determination is described which suggests an identification strategy based on other country characteristics it is found that for the top 20th percentile of countries in terms of growth in u s multinational affiliate value added as much as 8 6 of that growth between 1999 and 2003 can be attributed to declining relative stringency and enforcement of environmental policy the results are robust to a number of identification tests weak iv tests and third country spatial effects further evidence is found that relatively footloose industries are more likely to be affected by environmental policy than more traditionally dirty industries and enforcement of environmental policies tends to be a more important deterrent than the stringency of the policy set

an alternative analysis of apparent ekc type transitions abstract the hypothesis of the environmental kuznets curve ekc depends upon the assumption that countries pass through a similar environmental impact trajectory as they experience income growth implying that income levels determine pollution levels the authors present evidence that this is not representative of the way many individual country s pollution emission trajectories evolve and question the emphasis on income determinism by the ekc the study proposes that nonlinear dynamic systems analysis provides a more complete description of individual country pollution trajectories in the case of co 2 emissions the nonlinear time trajectories show abrupt transitions that occur contemporaneously with historical events and over a broad range of incomes

reexamining the empirical evidence for an environmental kuznets curve this paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities worldwide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted u shaped relationship between national income and pollution we test the sensitivity of the pollution income relationship to functional forms to additional covariates and to changes in the nations cities and years sampled we find that the results are highly sensitive to these changes and conclude that there is little empirical support for an inverted u shaped relationship between several important air pollutants and national income in these data

current wealth constraints on the housing demand of young owners in addition to generating housing services owner occupied housing units constitute a lumpy risky asset in household portfolios analysis of these dual consumption investment roles suggests the permanent wealth budget constraint in housing demand models should be decomposed into permanent returns from human capital and current net worth for young owners current net worth is hypothesized to be the dominant wealth component determining the quantity of housing demanded using a canadian microdata base evidence is found that net worth does provide both greater explanatory power and higher elasticities than labor earnings copyright 1990 by mit press

what are the impacts of climate policies on trade a quantified assessment of the paris agreement for the g20 economies abstract following the paris agreement climate policies have been developing rapidly consequently affecting all economic agents to this extent trade implications and competitiveness effects have been of prime concern to energy and climate policy makers in this study we employ the gem e3 hybrid cge model to quantify the regional and sectoral trade impacts of climate mitigation scenarios in line with the paris agreement we assess a global implementation of ndcs and a global mitigation action consistent with the 2 c target the scenarios differ in both effort sharing and mitigation stringency yet we find a reduction of global trade activity under both policy regimes the key driver is the sharp decline of global demand for fossil fuels fossil fuels a highly traded good are substituted by domestically produced goods like electricity or by capital equipment that is traded with lower intensity decarbonization policies have an important impact on trade flows affected by the relative stringency of action and the key characteristics of the regional economies we identify regions that benefit from the emergence of new markets for clean energy goods contrary to the fossil fuel exporters as well as regions that achieve a comparative advantage due to their preparedness from early mitigation action

environmental degradation in developing countries households and the reverse environmental kuznets curve abstract we propose an alternative explanation for the inverted u shape relationship between income and environmental degradation in developing countries production and consumption patterns of rural households are the main cause of environmental damage with a conventional household model we demonstrate that the so called environmental kuznets curve may arise when the restrictive assumption of a set of perfect markets for factors and commodities is relaxed depending on the criterion or indicator that is used to represent environmental pressure however we demonstrate that the reverse may also hold this finding highlights the importance of selecting the appropriate dependent variable in regression analyses

the value added of sectoral disaggregation implications on competitive consequences of climate change policies global impact assessment of unilateral climate policies is commonly based on multi sector multi region computable general equilibrium cge models that are calibrated to consistent accounts of production consumption and bilateral trade flows however global economic databases such as gtap treat energy intensive and trade exposed industries rather in aggregate thereby missing potentially important details on the heterogeneity of these sectors in this paper we elaborate on the availability of data resources and methodological issues in disaggregating energy intensive and tradeexposed sectors that receive larger attention in the public policy debate on unilateral emission regulation non ferrous metals iron and steel and non metallic minerals our sensitivity analysis revolves around three types of unobserved heterogeneity at the sub sectoral level trade elasticities energy consumption and technology specifications drawing on the example of border tax adjustments we find that for all given technology specifications and variation in energy shares the biggest differences emerge from variations in armington elasticities even moderate changes in armington elasticities can alter the magnitude and the sign of the effects at the sectoral level the implications of sub sectoral disaggregation are not as pronounced for macroeconomic indicators and leakage as for sectoral indicators

smart policies to reduce pesticide use and avoid income trade offs an agent based model applied to thai agriculture abstract policy makers in developing countries need better evidence of how changes in pesticide regulation would affect pesticide reduction and farm incomes but there are very few modeling tools that can provide such information the present study develops a new model based on mathematical programming based multi agent system mpmas a simulation software that allows assessing ex ante the impact of alternative pesticide use reduction strategies including combinations of pesticide taxes the introduction of integrated pest management a price premium for safe agricultural produce and subsidies for biopesticides the model is parameterized with farm and plot level data from northern of thailand where the adoption of high value cash crops has been accompanied by a rapid increase in synthetic pesticide use simulation results suggest that a pesticide tax alone has little effect on synthetic pesticide use a smart policy package combining integrated pest management a progressive pesticide tax based on toxicity and subsidies lowering the price of biopesticides can reduce average use of hazardous pesticides by 34 over current levels without adverse effects on the average farm income

effective costs and chemical use in united states agricultural production using the environment as a free input a cost function based production model is used to represent patterns of input use and output production in u s agriculture and the implied costs of induced reductions in risk from agricultural chemicals bad outputs we estimate and evaluate shadow values for these harmful outputs and the implied input and output specific substitution patterns with a focus on the impacts on pesticide demand and its quality and quantity components using state level data we find these measures to be statistically significant vary substantively by region and imply increased demand for effective pesticides associated with improvements in quality from embodied technology copyright 2002 oxford university press

the production of eco labels eco labeling is a market based technique for conveying information about consumers demands for environmental protection most criticisms of eco labeling have concentrated on demand side issues the potential for firms or countries to use eco labels to manipulate market power and the difficulty of creating credible labels in this paper we argue that fundamental problems also arise on the production side specifically we argue that both increasing returns to scale and complexities in production imply that it will be possible to market only a small percentage of environmental attributes through the use of eco labels we present evidence for our hypotheses from a detailed survey of 100 randomly selected consumer products

are there increasing returns to pollution abatement empirical analytics of the environmental kuznets curve in pesticides abstract according to the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis economic growth and the reduction of environmental degradation are compatible goals an inverted u shaped relationship between economic performance and environmental pollution suggests that empirically an economy is associated with smaller levels of pollution after some threshold income point one potential explanation for the empirical evidence of an ekc is increasing returns to pollution abatement where the abatement efficiency rises with an increase in the scale of abatement doubling the clean up efforts more than doubles the abatement of pollution as this efficiency gain makes abatement less expensive pollution might fall as more abatement is undertaken this study tests the hypothesis that there are increasing returns to abating pollution empirical evidence on environmental risks in the us agricultural sector since 1970 support the existence of increasing returns in addition i estimate the productivity of pollution abatement using refined empirical productivity measurement methods and explicitly control the level of technology the results show the importance of including an environmental productivity variable in the ekc framework

farmer training in off season vegetables effects on income and pesticide use in bangladesh the cultivation of crops outside the regular cropping calendar when supply is low and prices are high can give farmers better profits and consumers more choice however off season production may increase pesticide risk if crops are more affected by pests and diseases and farmers do not handle pesticides correctly this study quantified the effect of training in off season tomato production on the income and pesticide use of smallholder vegetable farmers in southwestern bangladesh the study uses farm level data from 94 trained and 151 non trained farm households and applies propensity score matching and inverse probability weighting to correct for selection bias for the average smallholder vegetable farmer training increased net household income by about 48 we found that 31 of the trained farm households who had initially adopted the technology continued its use in the second year but farm households who discontinued using the technology also experienced significant income gains from the training there was a significant increase in pesticide use 56 and although there was an improvement in pesticide handling practices trained farmers may have been more exposed to pesticide health risk the policy implication is that while off season vegetable production can create dramatic income improvements it is important to emphasize safe and sustainable pest management methods as part of policies promoting it

are there limits to growth a simple theoretical model of pollution is developed that generates an inverted u shape relationship between per capita income and environmental quality this model is then used to study long run growth the same inverted u shape is shown to appear in time series and the prospects for sustained growth are shown to hinge on whether increasingly strict environmental regulation is compatible with a constant rate of return on capital implementation is also studied tax and voucher schemes are shown to have an advantage over direct regulation because they provide the correct incentives for capital accumulation copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a conditional directional distance function approach for measuring regional environmental efficiency evidence from uk regions abstract this paper by using conditional directional distance functions as introduced by simar and vanhems j econometrics 166 2012 342 354 modifies the model by fare and grosskopf eur j operat res 157 2004 242 245 and examines the link between regional environmental efficiency and economic growth the proposed model using conditional directional distance functions incorporates the effect of regional economic growth on regions environmental efficiency levels the results from uk regional data reveal a negative relationship between regions gdp per capita and environmental inefficiency up to a certain gdp per capita level after that level it appears that the relationship becomes positive as an overall result the regional environmental inefficiency gdp per capita relationship appears to have a u shape form

collective action in an asymmetric world abstract a central authority possessing tax and expenditure responsibilities can readily provide an efficient level of a public good absent a central authority voluntary arrangements must replace coercive ones and significant under provision must be expected international public goods are particularly challenging due to the substantial asymmetries among nations small interest nations have strong incentives to ride cheaply our empirical results reveal cheap riding intentions in providing for climate change mitigation a critical international public good the evidence is provided by individual nations intended nationally determined contributions voluntarily pledged for the paris climate change conference we find that larger nations made much larger pledges in proportion to both their gross national incomes and their historical emissions implications for the nordhaus climate club and carbon tax proposals are discussed to achieve pareto optimality despite disparate cheap riding incentives we propose the cheap riding efficient equilibrium that solution takes the nash equilibrium as a base point and then applies the principles of either the nash bargaining solution or the lindahl equilibrium to proceed to the pareto frontier

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

productivity growth in world agriculture sources and constraints during the last half century advances in crop production came from expansion in areas irrigated from more intensive application of fertilizers and crop protection chemicals and from crop varieties that were more responsive to technical inputs and management advances in animal production came from genetic improvements and advances in animal nutrition differences among developed and developing countries in output per hectare and per worker have widened if these gaps are to be narrowed agricultural research capacity in developing countries will have to be substantially strengthened

environmental regulations in gravity equations evidence from europe one implication of the pollution haven hypothesis is that countries export more by applying more lenient environmental regulations most studies that apply gravity type equations do not find robust support for environmental regulations to affect bilateral exports in this paper we show that one can obtain robust negative effects of stringency as long as gravity equations are well specified with respect to theory our results based on the european data are both very consistent with us studies on environmental regulations and another line of very recent studies that infer non biased price or substitution elasticities from trade equations we show that more stringent environmental regulations when depicting a pure cost effect are reducing exports the coefficient is even larger in the case where exporting countries are central and eastern european countries comparing to the eu15 further we show that there is no significant difference in the impact of regulations on trade in case of dirty and clean sectors finally when using gmm estimation our environmental stringency coefficient gets significantly reinforced

agricultural pesticides and land use intensification in high middle and low income countries abstract we study levels and trends in agricultural pesticide use for a large cross section of countries using fao data for the period 1990 2009 our analysis shows that a 1 increase in crop output per hectare is associated with a 1 8 increase in pesticide use per hectare but that the growth in intensity of pesticide use levels off as countries reach a higher level of economic development however very few high income countries have managed to significantly reduce the level of intensity of their pesticide use because decreases in insecticide use at higher income levels are largely offset by increases in herbicide and fungicide use the results also show very rapid growth in the intensity of pesticide use for several middle income countries such as brazil mexico uruguay cameroon malaysia and thailand complementing our analysis with data from the rotterdam convention on prior informed consent pic we show that hazardous pesticides covered in the pic procedure are more weakly regulated in lower than in higher income countries we discuss the policy challenges facing developing countries with a rapid growth in pesticide use and recommend a four pronged strategy including an environmental tax on pesticides with revenues allocated to long term investments in awareness building the development of integrated crop management methods and the setting of food safety standards the interactions between these measures should help contribute to the effectiveness of the overall strategy package

valuing social sustainability in agriculture an approach based on social outputs shadow prices abstract interest in sustainability has gained ground among practitioners academics and policy makers due to growing stakeholders awareness of environmental and social concerns this is particularly true for agriculture however relatively little research has been conducted on the quantification of social sustainability and the contribution of social issues to the agricultural production efficiency this paper proposes a framework based on state contingent outputs to compute shadow prices of social outputs our methodological approach is based on the directional distance function and illustrated using a farm level dataset from a sample of catalan arable crop farms in 2015 our results indicate that in the sample of 180 farms included in the analysis efficiency scores are relatively high for the three alternative states of the nature considered in our state contingent analysis in addition our findings show that social outputs shadow prices are positive indicating that producing more social outputs is considered as great value to the farm for the efficient farms the social outputs shadow prices are contingent upon on the state of nature in a way that social outputs shadow prices increase with the improvement in crop growth conditions these results have implications in terms of eu farm payment redistribution

choice of mortgage instrument liquidity constraints and the demand for housing debt in the uk the research uses microdata to estimate reduced form mortgage demand equations based on truncated regressions dissagregated by choice of mortgage instrument the choice is between a standard annuity mortgage and a balloon type mortgage the endowment the estimates are used to indicate the differential impact of credit market rationing and financial liberalization on households the results indicate significant variations in mortgage demand by choice of mortgage instrument econometric testing demonstrates that the choice between an endowment and a repayment mortgage can be used as an exogenous indicator of liquidity and portfolio positions and different user costs of owner occupation

farmer risk assessment for voluntary insecticide reduction abstract we develop a theoretical basis for voluntary reduction in insecticide use and quantify the subjective value farmers place on reducing environmental risk the indirect utility model is used to quantify the acceptable financial cost of eliminating one insecticide application in return for avoidance of moderate risk to the environment the mean valuation in illinois iowa nebraska and ohio usa is 8 25 per acre acceptable yield loss increases with importance of environmental goods with formal education and with farming experience valuation increases with total expenditure on insecticides up to 89 per acre decomposition of the tobit model used in estimation indicates that voluntary programs should target intensification rather than extensification of participation to maximize effectiveness

bridging the trade environment divide protection for free traders this word represents the consummate evil for environmentalists it is the ultimate good of course for the trade community protection conjures up dark images of smoot and hawley while the environmental camp sees clear mountain streams lush green forests and piercing blue skies one cannot blame all of the tensions at the trade environment interface on linguistic differences but these competing perspectives are emblematic of a deep clash of cultures theories and assumptions trade officials often seek to limit efforts to link trade and environmental policy making and sometimes to prohibit such efforts altogether in this regard the narrow focus and modest efforts of the world trade organization s committee on trade and environment are illustrative 1 the launch of negotiations for a free trade area of the americas with an express decision to exclude environmental issues from the agenda provides an even starker example of the trade community s hostility toward serious environmental engagement economists have been prominent among those arguing that pollution control and natural resource management issues are best kept out of the trade policy making process cooper 1994 bhagwati 1999 other economists however have tried to set trade policy making in a broader context and to build environmental sensitivity into the international trading system runge 1994 rodrik 1997 summers 2000

supply chain differentiation contract agriculture and farmers marketing preferences the case of sweet pepper in thailand there is an emerging body of literature analyzing how smallholder farmers in developing countries can be linked to modern supply chains however most of the available studies concentrate on farm and farmer characteristics failing to capture details of institutional arrangements between farmers and traders moreover farmers preferences have rarely been considered here we address these gaps by analyzing different market channels for sweet pepper in thailand using data from a survey and choice experiment with farmers we find that there is a general preference for marketing options that do not involve a contract additional provision of inputs and credit can increase the attractiveness of contracts yet the most important factor for farmers is to personally know the buyer they deal with which may be related to issues of trust some policy implications are discussed

to spray or not to spray pesticides banana exports and food safety how governments regulate food safety and environmental protection including pesticide residue levels has important implications for trade the world trade organization wto ministerial held in doha qatar in november 2001 included statements on standards and their impact on market access for developing countries these issues will continue to be important in trade policy dialogues it is assumed and evidence from recent analysis confirms that food safety standards can affect the ability of agricultural producers to meet regulatory standards set by importing countries the authors explore a fundamental question in food safety and environmental standards do regulations on pesticide have an effect on trade they examine regulatory data from 11 oecd importing countries and trade data from 19 exporting countries the results suggest that a 10 percent increase in regulatory stringency tighter restrictions on the pesticide chlorpyrifos leads to a decrease in banana imports by 14 8 percent this represents a significant impact on trade and affect prospects of developing countries who continue to rely on exports of agricultural commodities such as bananas the findings also suggest that the lack of consensus on international standards and divergent national regulations on pesticides is costly for example the authors estimate that if the world were to adopt a standard at a level of regulatory stringency suggested by codex the body charged with setting global standards in this area in contrast with one set at the level in place in the european union there would be a u s 5 3 billion loss in world exports

cross sectional estimation of a simultaneous model of tenure choice and housing services demand abstract in this paper we analyze the demand for housing services integrating into a single analysis a systematic treatment of several important conceptual and empirical issues our three major objectives are to 1 evaluate the empirical importance of the simultaneity between the tenure choice and consumption level decisions 2 analyze the relationship between household type and housing demand and 3 present new estimates of the parameters of housing demand which are based on detailed microdata in the process we derive and estimate overall income and price demand elasticities which incorporate the impacts of income and price on both the tenure choice and consumption level decisions

theory and estimation in the economics of housing demand the main purpose of this paper is to review recent theoretical and empirical developments in the economics of housing demand in particular we ask what is known concerning the permanent income elasticity of housing demand vis a vis the current or measured income elasticity what is known concerning price elasticities what is the appropriate functional form for housing demand equations what is the role of demographic variables what is known concerning dynamic aspects of housing demand what appear to be the major sources of bias in existing estimates of demand equations

an ekc pattern in historical perspective carbon dioxide emissions technology fuel prices and growth in sweden 1870 1997 the environmental kuznets curve ekc has been subject to research and debate since the early 1990s this articleexamines the inverted u trajectory of swedish co2 emissions during an extended time

pesticide productivity host plant resistance and productivity in china abstract pesticides are used as the primary method of pest control in asian rice production conditions in china have led to demand for high and increasing rice yields resulting in intensive cultivation and adoption of fertilizer responsive varieties the consequence has been widespread pest infestations many studies have estimated pesticide productivity but few have estimated the productivity of alternative methods of pest control namely host plant resistance none have estimated the substitutability between these methods of pest control the productivity of pesticides and host plant resistance and the substitutability between them is measured using two stage cobb douglas and translog production functions under intensive rice production systems in eastern china pesticide productivity is low compared to the productivity of host plant resistance in fact returns to pesticide use are negative at the margin host plant resistance is an effective substitute for pesticides and substantial reductions in pesticide use could be achieved with no loss in rice production through improvements in host plant resistance these results suggest that pesticides are being overused in eastern china and host plant resistance is being under utilized government policies to promote increased pesticides in rice might be ill advised given the low productivity and negative returns particularly in light of well known negative externalities associated with pesticide use

environmental productivity and kuznets curve in india abstract as a result of india s extremely rapid economic growth the scale and seriousness of environmental problems are no longer in doubt whether pollution abatement technologies are utilized more efficiently is crucial in the analysis of environmental management because it influences the cost of alternative production and pollution abatement technologies in this study we use state level industry data of sulfur dioxide nitrogen dioxide and suspended particular matter over the period 1991 2003 employing recently developed productivity measurement technique we show that overall environmental productivities decrease over time in india furthermore we analyze the determinants of environmental productivities and find environmental kuznets curve type relationship existences between environmental productivity and income panel analysis results show that the scale effect dominates over the technique effect therefore a combined effect of income on environmental productivity is negative

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

a consumption based approach to environmental kuznets curves using the ecological footprint indicator recent research suggests that consumption based measures offer an insightful perspective on the debate on the relationship between economic growth and the environment in this article we deepen the

population economic growth and regional environmental inefficiency evidence from u s states we apply a conditional directional distance function allowing multiple exogenous factors to measure environmental performance we evaluate the air pollution performance levels of u s states for the years 1998 and 2008 states environmental inefficiency is determined by population size and gdp per capita gdppc the overall results reveal that there is much variation in environmental inefficiencies among the u s states a second stage nonparametric analysis indicates a nonlinear relationship between states population size gdppc levels and states environmental inefficiency levels our results indicate that environmental inefficiency on the whole decreases with increased population and income per capita but there are limits to this improvement and at high income and population levels the tendency may reverse

under and over use of pesticides an international analysis abstract this paper analyzes the economic political and environmental factors that contribute to the consumption and under or over use of pesticides using unbalanced panel data analysis we study how pesticide over or under use varies for countries with different per capita gross domestic product gdp and foreign direct investment fdi stock we begin by controlling for climatic and agricultural variables that should lead to variation in pesticide application rates the residual from the regression provides an indication of a nation s deviation in pesticide use relative to the mean the more negative the residual the more likely it is that that nation is under using pesticides the more positive it is the more likely it is that pesticides are being over used we study the correlation of this residual with important economic and political variables we find that at low levels of per capita gdp there is evidence of pesticide under use and that at the highest income levels there may be increasing over use we also look at the correlation of pesticide use with foreign direct investment stock farm size mechanization and democracy and in most cases find significant correlation with these variables

housing purchases and transitory income a study with panel data in this paper we explore the role of transitory income in the housing purchase decision because of moral hazard considerations banks typically require downpayments to be financed internally hence transitory income is potentially important in overcoming the downpayment constraint using a novel approach to the measurement of permanent and transitory income we estimate a two stage model in which households decide whether to purchase housing in the first stage and the quantity to be purchased in the second the results indicate a significant role for transitory income in both decision stages

patterns of state productivity growth in the u s farm sector linking state and aggregate models this article focuses on agricultural productivity growth at both sector and state levels it does so in a way that preserves the economic integrity of national and state production accounts a model accounting for interstate transactions in farm goods links sectorwide and state specific measures of total factor productivity growth an interesting conclusion is that the smooth persistently positive trend typically observed for farm sector productivity growth masks considerable variation across states and regions the results also indicate that farm sector productivity growth is wholly a function of productivity trends in the individual states interstate shifts in production activity and resource reallocations have had little impact