Julia Berazneva is an Assistant Professor at Middlebury College. Teevrat Garg is a Postdoc at the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and an Assistant Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California in San Diego. Jacob Hochard is an Assistant Professor at East Carolina University.
The 5th Annual Summer Conference of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists took place on June 9-11, 2016 in Breckenridge, Colorado. It featured two specific sessions on developing countries, and many other development papers were found in sessions on climate, forests, and agriculture, among many others. Below are micro-summaries of the papers that we saw. We tried to be as thorough as possible but this is not an exhaustive list of all development related papers at the AERE and we apologize to the authors whose papers we missed. Many of the papers are still works in progress, so we provide links to the authors’ websites when available.
Climate
Chan & Aldy examine to what extent activities under the Clean Development Mechanism (#CDM) in China lead to additional aggregate emissions reductions.
Eskander & Barbier show that agricultural households in #Bangladesh leverage portions of their land in rental markets to reduce disaster risk exposure.
Meng et al. identify incomplete risk sharing in the #global food market among countries experiencing spatially correlated shocks to cereal production from El Niño.
Tyagi studies the role of market-based instruments (carbon tax and emission permits) in reducing #India’s emissions according to the commitments of the Paris Agreement. #dynamicCGE #climatepolicy
Conservation
Christensen evaluates #China’s most important land conservation programs – Basic Farmland Protection Regulation in 1994 and key changes to the Land Administration Law in 1998 – to find that province-level rates of farmland conversion fell by 39-56% during the period 2000-2005. #diffindiff #landconservation
Hochard et al. find that 89% of coastal mangrove-holding populations are in developing countries. This form of natural capital shelters economic activity in coastal communities and supports post-disaster recovery. #global
Honey-Roses et al. finds that protected areas preserve biodiversity in #Mexico. #fe
Howlader computes welfare effects of protected #forest areas in #Nepal. #diffindiff
Jones studies the impact of a payment for ecosystem services (#PES) program in #Ecuador and finds that the program (Socio Bosque) provides additional forest conservation in some protected areas, however, additionality and leakages still need to be addressed. #matching #diffindiff #landconservation
Odame et al. look at whether a #PES program can incentivize land-use change in #Panama. Repeat exposure to PES programs can get at some market inefficiencies but also induce strategic behavior from participants.
Paudel studies the impact of community-managed forests on monthly food consumption and finds modest effects. #diffindiff
Deforestation
Feres, Araujo & Combes look at the role of off-farm income as a determinant of Amazon #deforestation to show that increasing off-farm and forestry revenues is likely to reduce deforestation and that smallholders are less responsive to increasing returns in off-farm activities than larger ones. #Brazil #pseudopanel
Silva, Fulginiti & Perrin estimate the shadow price of #deforestation in terms of forgone agricultural GDP in the Brazilian Amazon and find the average regional price of $129 (yearly lost agricultural GDP from one hectare of land). The shadow price is also calculated in terms of foregone agricultural activities – grains, timber, and livestock. #Brazil
Energy
Meeks, Sims & Thompson use an #IV approach in #Nepal to show that household biogas reduced firewood and dung collection, saving time for households. But don’t get too excited – the benefits depend on the region, presence of high-return labor options and forest protection policies.
McRae & Meeks elicit consumer’s understanding of electricity prices in #Kyrgyzstan and show that greater attentiveness to prices leads to large reductions in electricity use. #IV
Toman & Timilsina estimate that expanding trade of electricity in South Asia could yield cost savings of $9 billion annually and generate a net present value of nearly $100 billion over a 25 year planning horizon.
Firms
Harrison et al. test the impact of the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in #India requiring action plans: it led to increased investment in abatement technologies amongst the largest polluting firms but had no effect on coal consumption. But this came at the cost of lower productivity amongst those #firms. #diffindiff
Liu & Martin study the clean development mechanism in #India and find no evidence for adverse selection in supplying offsets. Overall emissions effects are moderated by expansion of output amongst participant #firms.
Institutions
Albers et al. examine the role of limited enforcement in a model for optimal marine protected area placement. Distance costs, fish dispersal dynamics and strategic interaction between fishers must all be considered simultaneously to avoid suboptimal placement. #CostaRica
Garg et al. show that competition in community driven development programs in #Indonesia can improve local participation and institutions and consequently have a positive spillover in the preservation of commons. #deforestation #rd
Jeuland, Pattanayak & Usmani emphasize the role of micro-institutions in adoption and use of improved cook stoves in #India. More NGO presence means more take-up of improved cook stoves and less use of fuel wood. #rct
Natural resources
Rodriguez, Pfaff & Velez conduct a field #experiment (coordination game) in four gold mining communities in #Colombia’s Pacific region to show that collective incentives are effective in reducing mining intensity, with better outcomes when the initial socially set aggregate targets are less severe. #goldmining
Berazneva et al. compare farmers’ perceptions of soil fertility with data from soil laboratory analysis and publicly available geo-spatial soils data. These subjective perceptions are also largely correlated with yields but no other management practices, and the inclusion/exclusion of any #soils data does not change yield or marginal physical product of fertilizer predictions. #Kenya #Tanzania
Water and Air Pollution
Garg et al. find that in-river bathing generates higher negative downstream health externalities than does trash disposal because of low avoidance behavior when pollutants are non-salient. #Indonesia #water
Chakraborti, Heres & Fernandez provide a #hedonic study of the land values in #Mexico City and how they are related to ambient #air pollution. They find the average willingness to pay for air quality to be $279 (in constant 2010 USD), six times as much as the magnitude in previous studies.
