Dissertations / Theses: 'Environment and resource economics'

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Tian, Huilan 1964. "Three essays on trade, resource and environment." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38525.

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This dissertation comprises three essays under the title "Three Essays on Trade, Resource and Environment".
The first essay develops a model of international duopoly involving competition both in prices and in levels of environmental friendliness, and studies the implications of government policies. It is shown that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, a regulatory increase in the minimum required level of environmental friendliness of the imported goods may harm the home firm, and may result in an increase in the volume of imports. It may also have adverse effects on the environment. Whether consumers lose or gain from such a regulatory increase depends on consumption spillover effects. We also show that, under certain conditions, the duopoly's equilibrium choice of levels of environmental friendliness is socially optimal.
The second essay investigates the properties of the dynamics of population and resource in a model where the objective function is to maximize the utility level of the least advantaged generation. Unlike in models with a utilitarian objective where the typical outcome is a unique steady state, it is found in our model that there is a continuum of steady states. Which steady state will be approached depends on the initial conditions. We show that for relatively large values of the resource stock, each steady state is conditionally stable in the saddlepoint sense; but for small values of the resource stock, the approach path to a steady state is non-monotone in the state space. Along the approach path to a steady state, the implicit discount rate varies over time.
The third essay extends the existing literature on regulation of polluting firms by taking into account the dynamics of investment in pollution abatement capital. It confirms that, under perfect competition, a Pigouvian tax can create the correct incentive for firms to invest and guide firms to achieve the social optimum. This tax path is time consistent. However, when there is a large polluter with price taking behavior, while an efficient and time consistent tax path exists, it is no longer subgame perfect unless the damage cost function is linear in emission. A non-linear taxation rule needs to be designed to achieve the socially optimal outcome. In the case of monopoly, a pair of instruments, an emission tax and a production subsidy, can lead the monopolist to achieve the social optimum. However, if pre-commitment is not possible, it is shown that linear feedback rules cannot achieve the first best outcome.

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Sun, Bin. "Essays on environmental economics and resource management." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1180553781.

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Kuusela, Olli-Pekka. "Three Essays in Natural Resource and Environmental Economics." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/50508.

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This dissertation analyses the impact of political and macroeconomic uncertainties on environmental outcomes and design of policy instruments. The first essay examines how the rate of agricultural land expansion in tropical countries depends on the nature and persistence of new political regimes. We use a novel panel data method that extends previous studies. We find that both new autocratic and democratic regimes have accelerated the expansion of agricultural land, thus yielding support to some of the findings in the earlier literature. Interesting differences emerge between regions, with the impact being most pronounced in Latin America. The analysis is developed more formally using a simple competitive land use model with political regime dependent confiscation risk and agricultural subsidy policy. The second essay evaluates the effectiveness of performance bonding for tropical forest concession management in achieving first and second best outcomes concerning reduced impact logging (RIL) standards. As a novel contribution, this essay introduces a simple model of two-stage concession design, and focus on the impact of three complications: harvester participation constraints, government repayment risk, and imperfect enforcement. We find several new and interesting results, in particular, imperfect enforcement and bond risk may deter implementation of bonding schemes as either the bond payment has to be set higher or the penalty mapping has to become more punitive. Policy implications, including potential for mechanisms such as REDD+ in improving the bonding outcomes, and the degree of financial support required to guarantee full implementation of RIL, are also examined. The third essay focuses on the relative performance of fixed versus intensity allowances in the presence of both productivity and energy price uncertainties. Both allowance instruments achieve the same steady-state emissions reduction target of 20%, which is similar to the current policy proposals, and the regulator then chooses the allowance policy that has the lowest expected abatement cost. We use a standard real business cycle (RBC) model to solve for the expected abatement cost under both policies. Unlike previous studies, our results show that under a reasonable model calibration, fixed allowances outperform intensity allowances with as much as 30% cost difference.
Ph. D.

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Byerly, Flint Hilary. "Increasing Private Contributions To Environmental Goods With Behavioral Insights." ScholarWorks @ UVM, 2019. https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/1051.

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Privately owned lands often undersupply environmental benefits and oversupply environmental costs through land use and management decisions. Insights into human behavior suggest a range of cognitive biases and nonstandard preferences that offer alternative explanations for and, perhaps, strategies to influence landowner behavior. People respond to simple changes in context and framing, make inconsistent choices over time, and respond to social influence—the opinions and behavior of peers. This dissertation applies insights from behavioral science to strategies that seek to influence individual decisions that impact the environment, especially related to land management. First, I review existing experimental research on behavioral insights to influence decisions in six domains that have large environmental externalities. Behavioral interventions, including changing the status quo and leveraging social influence, are often more effective than simply providing information, but there are few applications to land management. Chapter Two maps behavioral insights onto farmers’ plot-level conservation decisions that benefit biodiversity. Using a case study from California, USA, I find farmers who receive information from their peers are three times more likely to adopt practices that support biodiversity than those who do not. Chapter Three tests the causal effect of social influence on engaging Vermont forest owners in bird habitat conservation. Contrary to results from similar studies in other domains, information about peer participation reduced interest in the conservation program. Chapter Four presents results from another large-scale field experiment that tested the effect of message framing on contributions to water quality in a polluted urban watershed. Participants who read an emotional, personal narrative with tenuous connections to nutrient pollution were willing to pay more for nutrient runoff-reducing landscaping products than those who read a scientific description of nutrient pollution's impacts on ecosystems and surrounding communities. The findings from these four studies contribute to our understanding of environmentally relevant behavior, with implications for privately managed land and the environmental benefits it provides.

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Dury, Karen. "Essays in environmental and natural resource economics as a contribution to sustainable development." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1996. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14840/.

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This research focuses on the use of dynamic optimisation modelling techniques to describe the interactions between the economy and the environment. The environment not only provides us with economical1y valuable resources but also provides us ,with many essential services that support human welfare. Overexploitation of these resources and the destruction of the natural environment not only affects human welfare but may severely limit future production possibilities. For natural resources to continue to be inputs to production and to ensure equal access to environmental services by future generations, all ecological systems must remain in operation. The issue is how we treat our natural resources so that we have a sustainable economy. In this thesis, models are formulated that combine the economic and environmental processes. Current environmental concerns are incorporated into the framework of economic optimisation problems. The issues addressed are: 1. The competition for land of preservation and development. What is the optimal balance between the two? 2. Pollution from production can have negative effects on the environme~t. This in turn can affect the economy through diminished resource supply. What is viii the optimal use of these environmental resources so that we can sustain our productive capabilities? 3. Carbon emissions need to be controlled. A tax on emissions would encourage switching away from carbon intensive fuels. How should this tax behave over time - should it rise or fall? 4. With increasing populations, resources are being used up dramatically. Can we get to a point where the economy can be sustained while maximising human welfare? 5. What happens to a private firm's output decisions when it has to conform to environmental regulations? The models are useful for studying sustainable development in that they provide us with the steady state relations of a sustainable economy and, in some cases, the short run dynamics.

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Simms, Jason. "Turning Water into Wine: The Political Economy of the Environment in Southern California's Wine Country." Scholar Commons, 2013. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4581.

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This dissertation examines questions of water sustainability in contexts of wine production and state-led neoliberal development in the Temecula Valley, southern California, where wine tourism is at present being harnessed as an engine of economic growth. Natural and anthropogenic forces, such as global climate change, desertification, urban development, and the marketization and commodification of natural resources, affect the distribution and availability of water throughout the globe. As a result, the use of water, and associated political and environmental processes and consequences, in the production of global commodities, including wheat, citrus, and coffee, recently have come under increased scrutiny. Given wine's importance as a global commodity, and the concurrent growth of wine tourism as a worldwide phenomenon, local and regional water systems experience increasing strain to meet heightened demand for wine and the associated influx of tourists. This dissertation presents an ethnographic account of water use in the production of wine in Temecula, a desert-like setting already deficient in water that faces increasing human-induced pressures on its limited supply. Despite its social importance, very few dedicated ethnographies of wine and winemaking within the United States exist. This dissertation also describes the waterworld of Temecula, using (and critiquing) the model presented by Ben Orlove and Steven C. Caton that examines water in terms of value, equity, governance, politics, and knowledge systems, showing how these elements manifest in three "sites": the watershed, the water regime, and the waterscape. In Temecula, the winery serves as a central locus within the waterworld, a contested representation of the interests, goals, and perspectives of primary actors and stakeholders, while also serving as an important vector of landscape transformation through time. Despite this, no anthropological treatment examining water and winemaking within broader frameworks of the political economy of the environment and historical ecology is extant, a lacuna that this dissertation addresses. Throughout 2012, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork including archival research, interviews, and participant-observation. For the majority of my fieldwork, I spent time at an established winery in Temecula, during which I participated in many tasks related to wine production, with a focus on water use. Throughout this process, I interviewed dozens of people, including long-time residents, early pioneers in the Temecula wine industry, winery and vineyard employees, water management professionals at local and state levels, environmental service technicians, and many others. This dissertation demonstrates that under conditions of neoliberal development in challenging economic times in Temecula, environmental concerns such as water availability and sustainability are suppressed or downplayed in order to prioritize goals related to economic growth and development. Ultimately I suggest that developers and local business leaders are guiding this political legerdemain, even if only implicitly, above the din of objections from at least a good number of area wineries, vineyards, and residents. Also, I suggest that as an applied outcome, the totality of potential costs and outcomes at all scales, including regional, must be considered, rather than obfuscated, simplified, or restricted to a local boundary, especially in terms of natural resources and their governance, when such areas lie within locales inexorably connected within a delicate ecological web.

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Ghosh, Soumendra N. "Measuring Natural Resource Scarcity Under Common Property Environment and Uncertainty: An Interpretive Analysis." DigitalCommons@USU, 1987. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/4209.

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The issue of natural resource scarcity has so far been addressed in the literature on the basis of various measures such as the unit cost of production, the relative market price, and the shadow price of a resource. Although it has been recognized that there exists some kind of jointness (sometimes inseparable) between an extractible resource and its surrounding environment, none of the measures, either theoretically or empirically, have included this concern. In order to extract and use a natural resource (e.g., coal) the environment (air, water, etc.) must also be used as a repository of the discharged wastes (e.g., sulphur oxides, nitrous oxides, particulates, etc.) . Moreover, if there is a mandated level of the environmental resource (e. g., clean air) that has to be maintained, then certain additional costs must be borne by society (firms utilizing the resource). Thus, in evaluating the scarcity of an extractible resource, the relative position of the environmental resource also must be evaluated. The present study has incorporated such jointness in the evaluation of the measure of resource scarcity. The theoretical model has been developed in an optimal control framework. It has been analytically shown that this new measure of resource scarcity would indicate a different trend compared to earlier ones. The measure of resource scarcity developed in this study captures previous measures as special cases. In an uncertain world, when the impacts of use of an extractible resource on the environment is not known the stock size of the environmental resource becomes uncertain. It has been analytically shown that in a situation of uncertain environmental stock the scarcity indicator would indicate a relatively slower extraction compared to that of a deterministic world. Empirical investigations in this study suggest that coal in use might be becoming relatively scarce if one considers the use of it in the electricity industry as the major use, compared to a situation where no environmental concerns are in effect.

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Haskell, Hilary A. "The Seven Deadly Sins of Sustainability: Is Capitalism Really at Fault?" Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/846.

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Although capitalism is usually seen as the culprit for many of the environmental issues society faces today, it is not necessarily at fault. The Seven Deadly Sins of Sustainability: Pride, Greed, Sloth, Gluttony, Wrath, Lust, and Envy, are the underlying reasons why capitalism fails in the face of sustainability. Through recognition of these human vices, better strategies can be used to address environmental issues through leveraging capitalistic economic solutions.

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Fadly, Dalia [Verfasser], and Mohamed [Akademischer Betreuer] Farzanegan. "Essays in Environmental and Resource Economics / Dalia Fadly ; Betreuer: Mohamed Farzanegan." Marburg : Philipps-Universität Marburg, 2019. http://d-nb.info/119136867X/34.

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Stolper, Samuel. "Oil and Water: Essays on the Economics of Natural Resource Usage." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493345.

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As the developing world continues its pace of rapid growth and the threat of climate change intensifies, the economics of natural resource usage become increasingly important. From the perspective of both economic efficiency and distributional equity, effective policy design is correspondingly urgent. Market failures such as imperfect competition, externalities, and incomplete information plague resource markets everywhere; and both initial endowments and policy interventions often have regressive incidence. I shed light on some of these issues by studying the economics of natural resource usage in two separate empirical contexts. The first is the market for automotive fuel in Spain; I measure pass-through -- the degree to which retail fuel stations "pass through" diesel taxes to final consumer prices -- and use it assess the distributional impacts of energy policy. The second is the Ganga River Basin of India; I estimate the impacts of environmental regulation on river water quality and infant mortality. In both contexts, I utilize estimates of policy impacts to examine the underlying mechanisms by which affected consumers and suppliers of natural resources make decisions.
Public Policy

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Vosooghi, Sareh. "Three essays on information and transboundary problems in environmental and resource economics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22867.

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The thesis contains three chapters on environmental and natural resource economics and focuses on situations where agents receive private or public information. The first chapter analyses the problem of transboundary fisheries, where harvesting countries behave non-cooperatively. In addition to biological uncertainty, countries may face strategic uncertainty. A country that receives negative assessments about the current level of the fish stock, may become “pessimistic” about the assessment of the other harvesting country, which can ignite “panic-based” overfishing. In such a coordination problem, multiplicity of equilibria is a generic characteristic of the solution. Both strategic uncertainty and equilibrium selection, relatively, have been given less attention in the theoretical literature of common-property natural resources. In this model, in the limit as the harvesting countries observe more and more precise information, rationality ensures the unique “global game” equilibrium, a la Carlsson and van Damme (1993). The improved predictive power of the model helps a potential intergovernmental manager of the stock understand the threshold behaviour of harvesting countries. The global game threshold coincides with the risk-dominance threshold of a precise information model, as if there was no strategic uncertainty, and implies that the countries select the corresponding risk-dominant action for any level of assessment of the stock. Gaining from the risk-dominance equivalence, I derive policy suggestions for the overfishing cost and the property rights in common-property fisheries. The second chapter develops a theoretical framework to examine the role of public information in dynamic self-enforcing international environmental agreements (IEAs) on climate change. The countries choose self-enforcing emission abatement strategies in an infinite-horizon repeated game. In a stochastic model, where the social cost of greenhouse gasses (GHG) is a random variable, a central authority, as an information sender, can control release of information about the unknown state to the countries. In the literature on stochastic IEAs, it is shown that comparison of different scenarios of learning by the countries, depends on ex-ante difference of true social cost of GHG from the prior belief of countries. Here, I try to understand, in a signalling game between the informed sender and the countries, whether the no-learning or imperfect-learning scenarios, can be an equilibrium outcome. It is shown that the equilibrium strategy of the sender, who is constrained to a specific randomisation device and tries to induce an incentive-compatible abatement level which is Pareto superior, leads to full learning of social cost of GHG of symmetric and asymmetric countries. Finally, in the third chapter, I again examine a setting, where a central authority, as an information sender, conducts research on the true social cost of climate change, and releases information to the countries. However, in this chapter, instead of restricting the sender to a specific signalling structure, the sender, who has commitment power, by designing an information mechanism (a set of signals and a probability distribution over them), maximises his payoff, which depends on the mitigation action of countries and the social cost of green-house gases(GHG). The countries, given the information policy (the probability distribution over signals) and the public signal, update their beliefs about the social cost of GHG and take a mitigation action. I derive the optimal information mechanism from the general set of public information mechanisms, in coalition formation games. I show that the coalition size, as a function of beliefs, is an endogenous variable, induced by the information sender. If the sender maximises the expected payoff of either of non-signatories or signatories of the climate treaty, then full revelation is the optimal information policy, while if the sender attempts to reduce the global level of GHG, then optimal information policy leads to imperfect disclosure of the social cost. Furthermore, given any of the specifications of the sender’s payoff, the optimal information policy leads to the socially optimal mitigation and membership outcomes.

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Meeusen, Karl M. "FORESTS, CARBON, AND BIOMASS ELECTRICITY GENERATION: TWO ESSAYS IN NATURAL RESOURCE ECONOMICS." The Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1316202710.

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Alsharif, Nouf Nasser. "Three essays on growth and economic diversification in resource-rich countries." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2017. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/70478/.

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This thesis looks into the relationship between natural resources and non-resource economic activity in resource-rich countries. This relationship has been investigated through the literature of the “resource curse” which was first noted by Sachs and Warner (1995) who show a significant negative relation between natural resource dependence and income growth. Despite the developing literature in that area, empirical tests suffered from endogeneity. In this thesis, I try to add more resilient identification strategies in order to assess the effect of resource abundance on the macro economy using exogenous variations in 136 countries from 1962-2012. The first essay of this thesis examines the correlation between natural resource rents and economic diversification. The main question I ask in this essay is can resource-rich countries diversify their economies? To address this issue, the essay empirically tests diversification in exports, in employment and in value added and finds a significant negative impact. In the second empirical essay of this thesis, I focus on giant oil and gas discoveries as the main external variation and test the role of institutional quality in diversification when a country becomes resource abundant. Results show that all countries with varied institutional quality go through export concentration after giant oil discoveries. The third empirical essay looks more thoroughly into the manufacturing sector. I estimate the causal effect of two commodity shocks suggested by the Dutch Disease hypothesis on the tradable manufacturing industries: giant oil discoveries as a resource discovery shock, and oil price boom and bust as a commodity price shock. The results suggest a negative impact on the tradable industries growth in manufacturing value added and wages. These results add more credible empirical evidence to the Dutch Disease literature.

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Daigneault, Adam J. "Fire, carbon, timber, and trees three essays in natural resource economics /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1155657159.

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Sahlén, Linda. "Essays on environmental and development economics : Public policy, resource prices and global warming." Doctoral thesis, Umeå universitet, Nationalekonomi, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-1957.

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This thesis consists of four self-contained papers, which are all related to important environmental and natural resource issues from a developing country perspective. Paper [I] concerns climate policy and addresses the potential welfare gains of introducing a technology transfer from the North (richer countries) to the South (poorer countries). The results largely depend on the environmental policy in the pre- transfer resource allocation and, in particular, whether or not the South abates its own emissions. Although the technology transfer is desirable from a “global social planners” point of view, it is shown that the incentives to use the transfer might be weak from the perspective of the North; at least if the South takes its own measures to reduce emissions. However, in a situation where the North is committed to emission reductions according to the Kyoto protocol, it is shown that there will clearly be incentives for the North to use the technology transfer in order to reach the Kyoto targets in a more cost efficient way. In paper [II], the likely effects of an environmental fiscal reform in Namibia are examined by means of a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. The results show that the introduction of an environmental fiscal reform, where taxes on natural and environmental resources (fish rents, energy and water) are recycled to the economy in different ways might give rise to benefits in terms of GDP, employment and income distribution, in addition to the environmental impacts. While subsidizing unskilled labour would give the most favourable outcome in terms of real GDP and employment impacts, a decrease in food taxes might be a more interesting option if GDP, employment, income distribution and environmental impacts are considered in combination. In paper [III], the value of irrigation water used for different crop alternatives in the Hardap region in Southern Namibia is estimated. The study finds that all crop alternatives that farmers in the region currently choose among, will remain financially viable after the planned increases in user charges. However, if full cost recovery is to be achieved in the future, substantial changes in the agricultural production will most likely be necessary. The method is also extended in order to study the potential effects on total water demand if further increases in user charges are implemented. Paper [IV] studies the likely effects of exogenous international food and oil price shocks on the Namibian economy. This is particularly interesting in a country where the domestic consumption of corn and petroleum products is mainly imported, and where water scarcity represents one of the main constraints to agricultural expansion. The results show that the Namibian economy will be negatively affected from the food and oil price increases, and water scarcity will further limit the ability of the economy to adapt to international oil and food price increases.

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Sahlén, Linda. "Essays on environmental and development economics : public policy, resource prices and global warming /." Umeå : Department of Economics, Umeå University, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-1957.

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Geleta, Solomon. "Measuring Citizens' Preferences for Protecting Environmental Resources| Applications of Choice Experiment Surveys, Social Network Analysis and Deliberative Citizens' Juries." Thesis, Colorado State University, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10262222.

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Many reasons have been suggested as explanation for observed differences in citizens' environmental conservation projects policy choices and willingness-to-pay (WTP) values. Some people attribute this distinctive decision behavior to contrasts in the overall policy outcome expectations (preference heterogeneity) and/or differences in reactions to the changes in the environmental attributes (response heterogeneity). Others attribute this to differences in individual choice rationales, personalities, encounters, and past and present experiences. In other words, regardless of the possibility that outcomes are the same, people do not have the same emotions, convictions, disposition, or motivations.

In three separate essays, I investigate the possible reasons for the observed differences in citizens' environmental conservation policy choices and examine how preference and response heterogeneity arise. In the first essay, I ask if a priori environmental damage perception is a source of heterogeneity affecting conservation option choice decisions. In the second, I investigate if social networks (interactions among decision-making agents) affect choice decisions. In the third, I investigate if preferences change when decision making agents are allowed to deliberate among peers.

For the first essay, I conducted an on-line choice experiment (CE) survey. The survey asked questions that help to measure citizen preference for protecting environmental public goods, ascertain the value local residents are willing-to-pay (WTP), and determine how preference heterogeneity arises. CE attributes included groundwater use (measured by share of total water use from groundwater), aquatic habitat (measured by count of spawning kokanee salmon return), natural habitat health (measured by the sensitive ecosystem area reclaimed), and rural character (measured by a decrease in urban sprawl and/or a decrease in population density in rural areas). I used a special property levy as the vehicle of payment. Random parameter logit (RP) and latent class (LC) models were estimated to capture response and preference heterogeneity. The results suggest that (1) both preference and response heterogeneities were found for the choices and all environmental attributes respectively (2) respondents who have a higher value for one environmental good will have a higher value for other environmental goods, and (3) a priori damage perception could be one of the sources of response and preference heterogeneity.

In the same survey, I included people's egocentric networks, interactions, environment related activities and perceptions to empirically evaluate whether social network effect (SNE) is a source of systematic differences in preference. I estimate consumer preferences for a hypothetical future environmental conservation management alternative described by its attributes within a Nested Logit Model: nesting broader and distinct conservation options within choices impacted by individual’s network structure. The results show that some network centrality measures capture preference heterogeneity, and consequently the differences in WTP values in a systematic way.

Third, I compare the value estimated based on the traditional choice experiment (CE) with the results obtained using the citizen jury (CJ) approach or a group-based approach or also called the "Market Stall" in some literature. I estimate the effect of deliberation on conservation choice outcomes by removing any significant differences between the people who participated in the CJ (people who volunteered to be contacted again after deliberation treatment) and those people who did the survey twice but did not volunteer for CJ (control group) in terms of their socioeconomic status and be able attribute the changes in preferences to deliberation treatment only. CJ approach involved two 90 minute deliberations held over two days to discuss and consider their preferences and WTP values with other household members. Results show that deliberation improves individuals' valuation process and there is observed difference in choice outcomes between the deliberation treatment and control groups. Both preference and response heterogeneity relatively vanish when people were allowed to deliberate among peers.

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Tymoshenko, O. "Ecological and economic aspects of resource provision of mining enterprise." Thesis, Sumy State University, 2015. http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/40865.

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Mining companies use ore reserves incompletely, that is due to, on the one hand, unfavorable geological conditions of ore deposits occurrence, on the other – the low and slow-performing solution for complete and integrated use of existing reserves.

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Parks, Jacob. "OIL, POLITICS OF THE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT AND THE PERSIAN GULF." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2008. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/4109.

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This study investigated the effect the price of oil has on enabling political establishments to maintain their presence within the business environment. The study consists of three different case studies with each of the states (Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates) being chosen based upon their level of state involvement within the business community. Each case study investigated whether the price of oil had any effect on influencing the amount of political involvement within the business community, property rights or trade freedom. The findings for all three case studies suggest that the price of oil has little to no effect on determining the amount of influence the state possesses within the business environment. Based on the results of this investigation, recommendations were made to improve the United States relationship with each country. Additional analysis and recommendations were made concerning the future economic impact of Iraq relying solely on oil as its revenue source.
M.A.
Department of Political Science
Sciences
Political Science MA

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Nemati, Mehdi. "ESSAYS ON ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS AND POLICY." UKnowledge, 2018. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/agecon_etds/66.

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Environmental goals such as urban water conservation and pollution control regulations are typically achieved through price and non-price methods. This dissertation offers an analysis of the non-price approaches, including the rationing of water for particular users, installation of particular technologies, and adoption of particular certifications to achieve environmental goals. To begin, an analysis of California’s 2015 urban water conservation mandate was performed. Results indicate that the average welfare loss of the mandate is $6,107 per acre-foot of restriction in Northern California and $2,757 per acre-foot of restriction in Southern California. In terms of monthly household-level willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid the mandate, results illustrate that households have a WTP between $5 and $200 per month. Northern Californian utilities were generally in compliance with their mandated conservation targets, while Southern Californian utilities tended to fall short. The second essay focuses on analyzing how web-based Home Water Use Reports (HWURs) affect household-level water consumption in Folsom City, California. The HWURs under study, offered by the company Dropcountr (DC), share social comparisons, consumption analytics, and conservation information to residential accounts, primarily through digital communications. We found that there is a 7.8% reduction in average daily household water consumption for a typical household under treatment of the DC program. Results suggest that the effect of DC varies by the baseline consumption quintile, the number of months in the program, the day of the week, message type, and enrollment wave. Furthermore, we find that indicate these responses to DC program likely come from the information channel rather than moral suasion. The final essay studies the effectiveness of ISO-14001 on pollution reduction as a non-price pollution control approach. Manufacturers have been increasingly relying on environmental management systems (such as ISO 14001 based ones) to comply with government regulations and reduce waste. In this essay, we investigated the impact of ISO 14001 certification on manufacturers’ toxic release by release level. Results show that ISO 14001 had a negative and statistically significant effect on the top 10% manufacturing sites regarding the on-site toxic release, but it did not reduce off-site toxic release. Therefore, one should not expect ISO 14001 to have a uniform impact on manufacturing sites’ environmental performance. For large firms, encouraging voluntary adoption of ISO 14001 might be an effective government strategy to reduce on-site pollution.

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Passewitz, Gregory R. "Social Exchange Theory and Volunteer Organizations: Patterns of Participation in Four Environmental/Natural Resource Organizations." The Ohio State University, 1991. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392653996.

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Parvez, Md Rezwanul. "Essays on Land Conversion, Crop Acreage Response, and Land Conservation Benefits| Evidence from the Dakotas." Thesis, North Dakota State University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10641458.

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This research is composed of three essays. It highlights the driving factors of land conversion and crop acreage response focusing on North Dakota agriculture and estimates the benefits of conservation land measures at west central South Dakota watershed. The major questions that are addressed here are how and why agricultural producers decide among different land use choices, crop selection, and land conservation measures and how their decision vary over time? The first essay examines the long run land conversion trend interconnected with change in crop, oil, and ethanol prices, climate and renewable fuel policy mandates. Data are obtained from Cropland Data Layer from 1997 to 2015 period of National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) at the USDA. The first essay employs a Seemingly Unrelated Tobit Regression approach to better understand the connection between land conversion and crop prices, biofuel policies, biophysical environment. Key findings indicate land-use conversion from grassland to cropland is relatively higher across the ND counties.

The second essay is designed to investigate the relationship between crop acreage response and socio-economic and environmental drivers. We use prices for crude oil, planted acres of major crops (corn, wheat, soybean, hay) and prices from the period of 1990 to 2015. This essay focuses on corn acreage response due to crop prices, energy policies, climate and other socio-economic factors using a Fixed Effect parameter framework.

The final essay estimates environmental benefits due to adoption of conservation practices. In other words, it analyzes the economic and environmental benefits of implemented conservation practices at Bad River watershed in South Dakota using an integrated framework. For example, in an article in the Global Journal of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development (2016), a Benefit Cost Analysis model is utilized to assess soil conservation benefits and evaluate economic impacts of conservation measures at a watershed scale. The economic analysis includes estimation of benefit cost ratio, annual rate of return of conservation practices. Key findings suggest that benefit value of sediment reduction average $2.13 per ton expressed in constant (year = 2000) dollars and the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than 1.

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Fadali, Elizabeth. "Water Use, Virtual Water and Water Footprints| Economic Modeling and Policy Analyses." Thesis, University of Nevada, Reno, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3608707.

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The theme that binds together the four papers in this dissertation is the tracking of physical quantities of water used by industries in the economy, and an exploration of whether and how this tracking could be helpful in informing water policies, as applied to the state of Nevada or sub-regions of Nevada. The concept of water footprints has been wildly popular in disciplines outside of economics and has been used to help make policy decisions normally considered to lie within the economist's realm. Yet many economists shun 'footprints' in general and water footprints in particular, seeing them as descriptive methods that have little or nothing to add to policy analysis. This thesis attempts to bridge a gap between economists, engineers and planners and the popular imagination about what economic concepts footprints are related to and how they can best be used in policy analysis.

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Mmopelwa, Gagoitseope. "The value of the Okavango delta a natural resource accounting approach /." Thesis, Pretoria : [s.n.], 2006. http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-12072006-152953.

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Goodenberger, James Stevenson. "Three Essays Regarding the Economics of Resources with Spatial-Dynamic Transition Processes." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468964324.

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Fernandez, Cheryl Joy Jardiolin. "Marine protected area : a case study in north-easter Iloilo, Philippines : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management in Economics, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand." Massey University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1250.

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Marine Protected Area (MPA), as a fisheries management tool has been promoted by both national and local conservationists and has provided de facto illustrations of integrated coastal management (ICM) in the Philippines. However, conflict is inevitable in the implementation of public policy such as the MPA because of contrasting objectives and expectations from various stakeholders. Coupled with non-human (e.g. MPA size) and human (e.g. mismanagement) threats, conflict becomes a hindrance to MPA effectivity. In the Philippines alone, only 10-20% of the 500 MPAs are attaining their objectives. This study presents an overview of MPA management and examines the interaction between the civil society and market forces of institutional arrangements in the case of North-Eastern Iloilo (NI) in the Philippines. It discusses overall scenarios that resemble conflict between various national, local and international sectors, assessing MPA success factors and the expected implications from such implementation. Results from key informant, focus-group discussion and social survey show that there are problems on MPA management in the region. Using data and strategic analyses, it presents that minimisation of conflicts amongst actors should be the primary goal of the NI municipalities. In addition, MPA size and membership to organisations are also significant factors of success. Moreover, the analysis from a simple correlation to complex Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) conclude that information on MPA regulation does not directly contribute to the improvement in MPA management. It implies that a focus on informing stakeholders about the benefits of having an MPA and its regulations is ineffective. The focus should be on the reduction of conflict between economic actors - for free riding problems are currently occurring, thus minimising conflict by conflict resolution and proper incentives. However, there are still remaining challenges on MPA management, for not all factors are incorporated on this study. The challenge now is on how to identify the remaining factors and integrate them into policies and implementations to improve the overall condition of coastal communities.

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Matheis, Michael Roy. "Mining Booms and Busts: New Evidence on the Consequences of Mining in the U.S." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/556593.

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The extraction of natural resources can lead to higher incomes and standards of living for local areas, but resource exploitation, a lack of broad economic development, and an excess amount of environmental pollution can come with this activity. This dissertation analyzes the short and long run economic, public health, and demographic consequences of economic development via natural resources. It expands upon the current non-renewable resource extraction, "resource curse," and local community health literatures by using county data for the entire U.S. spanning over a century, capturing both short and long run impacts over various time periods, on net-migration, mortality, natality, local economic activity, and environmental impacts. What drove coal production in the U.S. during the twentieth century? How effective were the operators at predicting and responding to changes in price? Did coal mining industries provide broad economic benefits to local communities in non-mining sectors? Did the impacts differ over time? Has natural resource extraction activity caused mortality in the area to increase? To answer these questions I collected, compiled, and digitized a long run panel database of county level mining activity, mortality, natality, and pollution spanning the entire U.S. The dissertation identifies the short and long run net effects of natural resource extraction activity with time-varying measures, and an IV approach that isolates changes in local mining activity independent of local conditions and outcomes. The dissertation shows that coal producers responded to variation in prices, and were aware and responded to past price behavior. Chapter 3 shows increased levels of coal production had positive net impacts on county population and manufacturing employment over an initial ten year span, then became negative over the subsequent decade. This provides evidence that the existence of a "resource curse" on local manufacturing is a long run phenomena. Chapter 4 shows that extraction activity increased infant and total mortality, had no impact on contemporaneous total cancer mortality, and may be driven by areas where coal mining was historically prevalent. Past and present mining activity is strongly related to local pollution, supporting the idea that increasing local environmental pollution increases mortality.

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Halpern, Gator. "Aquculture and Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_theses/40.

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This study examines whether aquaculture has the potential to reduce deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. The natural resources of the Peruvian Amazon are subject to extreme pressures due to increases in subsistence farming, cattle ranching, and logging in the region. The resulting loss of biodiversity has affected the delicate soil balance that is characteristic of the Amazon, and has contributed to water pollution as well as erosion (Guerra et al. 2001). One of the highest rates of deforestation in the Amazon basin can be found at the foothills of the eastern Andes (Lepers et al. 2005), which includes the area in this study, located in the Peruvian state of Amazonas. In this part of the Amazon, deforestation is mainly caused by small-scale subsistence agriculture (Achard et al. 1998) such as that found in the communities of Condorcanqui. Fishing is an essential part of the socio-economic system that functions in the Peruvian Amazon. Fish meat is the most important source of animal protein in the Amazon, and the main generator of cash for indigenous people (McDaniel, 1997). However, freshwater Amazonian fisheries have been subject to extreme overexploitation in the past few decades (Rainforest Conservation Fund, 1999). Boats with technological equipment and large-scale capacities have threatened stocks in local rivers and oxbow lakes, which has affected the ability of small-scale, native fisherman to support themselves (Rainforest Conservation Fund, 1999). The Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonia Peruana (IIAP) has assisted the development of fish farming in the Condorcanqui region as a way to augment diets and decrease the ecological impact of subsistence farming. Fish farming can also be seen as a way to substitute for the loss of traditional river fishing. IIAP has become the leading governmental organization in fisheries research and aquaculture in the Peruvian Amazon, and works to provide native-species fingerlings, and educational courses to native aquaculturists. This study surveys the subsistence villages along road and river communities to determine the impact of fish farming on deforestation in the Condorcanqui region. This region is populated by small communities of indigenous Awajún and Wampí tribesmen, who practice subsistence agriculture. Data was collected from a sample of 184 families in ten different communities. Five of the villages were situated along the banks of the Nieva or Santiago river systems, while the other five were accessible by road, travelling southwest from the town of Santa Maria de Nieva. Data was collected with the assistance of the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon (IIAP), which provided a guide who had relations with all of the communities. All of the families in the sample practice subsistence agriculture, while 104 of the respondents supplement their agricultural crops with fish from aquaculture ponds integrated into their farmland. The participants answered a range of questions about the size of their farms, and the productivity of their land. We use a variety of regression-based approaches to determine how incorporating aquaculture into subsistence farmlands affects deforestation rates after controlling for socioeconomic and farm characteristics. Our study suggests that an extra square meter of aquaculture reduces the area deforested for crops on approximately a one for one basis. However, aquaculture should maintain its productivity for much longer than cropping, as it does not depend on soils whose fertility can be exhausted in a few years. Our simulations, based on our survey results, indicate that over time aquaculture should reduce deforestation significantly, especially in areas where soils provide only a few years of subsistence crops. These should be regarded as interesting but preliminary results. Because we used a convenience-based sampling approach, our results could be affected by selection bias. In addition, we do not have enough information to test whether selection bias in the implementation of fish farming affect our results. Therefore, these results suggest that aquaculture could be useful in limiting deforestation, but additional work should use experimental methods or more in-depth surveys to measure the effect of aquaculture on deforestation.

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Hull, Robert. "Environmental Economics: A Case Study for the Big Cottonwood Canyon Watershed." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_theses/73.

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Environmental economics is the application of economic principles to the study of how natural resources are developed and managed. The methodologies used attempt to value ecosystem services provided by healthy, functioning natural lands and ecosystems. Ecosystem services attributed to natural lands contribute significant human welfare benefits that go largely undervalued or misrepresented in the decision-making process for the development of land. As environmental valuation methodologies and techniques continue to advance, policy decisions will be better able to create outcomes that maximize benefits for targeted populations and landscapes. The purpose of this paper is to first describe the methodologies used in environmental economics. These methodologies will then be applied to the Big Cottonwood Canyon Watershed located to the east of Salt Lake City, Utah. The case study will describe the ecosystem services provided by the watershed and value them. Using these values, the study focuses on the proposed development of SkiLink, a gondola system that would connect two separate ski resorts in two separate canyons – the Solitude Mountain Resort, located in Big Cottonwood Canyon, and Canyons Resort, located near Park City, Utah. The debate over the proposed SkiLink focuses on weighing its potential contribution to Utah’s economy against its potential environmental consequences. Based on a detailed analysis of the economic benefits and ecosystem losses created by the proposal, a cost-benefit analysis of the project will be presented along with recommendations for further study of potential development that would likely accompany the building of SkiLink.

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Foster, Alec. "A Contingent Valuation of Tampa’s Urban Forest Resource." Scholar Commons, 2010. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3551.

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Urban forests provide environmental, social, and economic benefits to urban residents. These benefits are often overlooked when making spatial and financial distributive decisions in urban areas. The City of Tampa has demonstrated interest in its urban forest resource and estimated its extent and some of the benefits provided. Estimating economic values for benefits that have not been quantified can help to ensure that resources are distributed more efficiently. Five methods to estimate urban forest benefits in the City of Tampa are reviewed, with contingent valuation being the method chosen out of this review process. A mailed, dichotomous choice contingent valuation survey was executed with two points of contact, yielding 107 responses for a 21.4 percent response rate. Despite positively rating the City’s urban forest, the majority of respondents (62.6 percent) were willing to pay for it to increase. The Turnbull distribution-free estimator was used to estimate a lower bound of $3.23 for willingness to pay to increase Tampa’s urban forest resource by 250,000 trees. Willingness to pay was positively associated with income and education. The survey responses also yielded important attitudinal and behavioral information that can help local decision makers increase the efficiency of urban forest distribution, maintenance, and promotion.

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Duru, Christian Udogadi. "Environmental Degradation: Key Challenge to Sustainable Economic Development in the Niger Delta." ScholarWorks, 2014. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/114.

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Gilbert, Ethan. "Water Policy: The World's Most Important Resource Politicized." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2012. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/520.

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Water is the most important resource on the planet for sustaining life, and many consider access to water as a fundamental human right. However, in light of its necessity, the distribution and allocation of water has become a highly politicized issue. Economic and political conditions have been shown to be influential in shaping a country’s water policy, more so then recognition of water as a basic human right. The reason for this is that many agree that there needs to be a value assigned to water to encourage its conservation and efficient use, and different methods of addressing that issue have led to varying degrees of privatization of water. Whether through the private or public sector, there is an expectation that water be delivered to the people by the government, and it is often the influence of public and private actors within the government that direct the policy for water distribution. Using three cases in Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay it will be demonstrated how water policy has correlated with the political and economic changes within each country.

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Meeks, Robyn. "Essays on the Economics of Household Water Access in Developing Countries." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10367.

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This dissertation focuses on the economics of household water access in developing countries. The first paper explores whether improvements in water technology enable changes in household time allocation and, thereby, productivity gains. To do so, it exploits differences in timing of shared water tap construction across Kyrgyz villages. Households in villages that received the drinking water infrastructure are more likely to have water close to their homes. This reduced the time intensity of home production activities impacted by water. Village-level incidence of acute intestinal infections fell amongst children. Although adults show no signs of health improvements, they do benefit from reductions in the time spent caring for sick children. Individuals reallocate time savings to additional leisure and market labor, primarily work on the household farm, and the returns to the additional farm labor approximately equal the hourly farm wage. Time intensive water collection can be a source of gender inequality in households lacking water infrastructure. The second paper uses a natural experiment to investigate culture as a source of gender inequality and its role in determining gender roles for activities, such as water collection. Using exogenous variation in district-level cultural composition due to events in Kyrgyzstan during Soviet rule, I estimate the persistence of differences in gender equality between traditional sedentary farming cultures and nomadic herding cultures. Results indicate that Soviet institutions increased educational attainment in both cultures. Other cultural differences - such as gender of household water collector and perceptions of domestic violence - persist. One impediment to the construction of water infrastructure is insecure land tenure or property rights. The third paper explores whether alleviating this impediment through a program providing land titles in rural Peru is associated with improvements in water access. Utilizing the phased in timing, I exploit the differences in project implementation timing between households that held property titles prior to the project and those that did not. Results indicate that land titling is associated with increases in water access. Supporting evidence suggests that either the government or a utility might be responsible for the improvements.

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Cicala, Steven Joseph. "Essays on the Allocation of Scarce Resources among Competing Ends." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10994.

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The first chapter of this dissertation evaluates changes in fuel procurement practices by coal- and natural gas-fired electricity generating plants in the United States following state-level legislation that ended cost-of-service regulation. I construct a detailed dataset that links confidential, shipment-level data on the price of virtually all of the fuel delivered to coal- and gas-fired electricity plants in the United States from 1990-2009, with plant-level data on operations and regulatory status. I find the price of coal drops by 12% at deregulated plants relative to matched plants that were not subject to any regulatory change, whereas there was no relative drop in the price of gas. I show how my results lend support to theories of asymmetric information between generators and regulators, regulatory capture, and capital-bias as important sources of distortion under cost-of-service regulation. The second chapter analyses changes in the cost of generating electricity following the introduction of regional wholesale electricity markets. I use proxy methods based on Olley and Pakes (1996); Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) to estimate fuel-specific production functions, and construct the Olley-Pakes productivity index to decompose costs in to within-plant productivity and allocative efficiency changes. I then apply a potential outcomes framework to the derived productivity estimates, allowing the construction of counterfactual costs that explicitly account for permanent differences between market and non-market areas and common transitory shocks. I find that the introduction of market-based dispatch methods has reduced fossil-fuel production costs by upwards of 15%. The third chapter is based on joint work with Roland Fryer and Jorg Spenkuch. We develop a Roy model in which individuals sort into peer groups based on comparative advantage. Two key results emerge: First, when comparative advantage is the guiding principle of peer group organization, the effect of moving a student into an environment with higher-achieving peers depends on where in the ability distribution she falls and the effective wages that clear the social market. As a result, linear in means estimates of peer effects are not identified. We show that the model’s testable prediction in the presence of this confounding issue is borne out in two data sets.
Economics

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Spash, Clive L. "The Shallow or the Deep Ecological Economics Movement?" Elsevier, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.05.016.

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Ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation, shadow pricing, sustainability measures, and squeezing Nature into the commodity boxes of goods, services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic, financial and banking discourses. There are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social, psychological, political and ethical facets. The relationship with Nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching. However, this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation. A shallow movement, allied to a business as usual politics and economy, has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values. If, instead, ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society. The implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st Century. (author's abstract)

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Benincasa, Stefano. "Evolutionary Behavioral Economics: Essays on Adaptive Rationality in Complex Environments." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Trento, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/11572/268752.

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Against the theoretical background of evolutionary behavioral economics, this project analyzes bounded rationality and adaptive behaviour in organizational settings characterized by complexity and persistent uncertainty. In particular, drawing upon the standard NK model, two laboratory experiments investigate individual and collective decision-making in combinatorial problems of resource allocation featuring multiple dimensions and various levels of complexity. In the first study, investment horizons of different length are employed to induce a near or distant future temporal orientation, in order to assess the effects of complexity and time horizon on performance and search behaviour, examine the presence of a temporal midpoint heuristic, and inspect the moderating effects of deadline proximity on the performance-risk relationship. This is relevant for organizational science because the passage of time is essential to articulate many strategic practices, such as assessing progress, scheduling and coordinating task-related activities, discerning the processual dynamics of how these activities emerge, develop, and terminate, or interpreting retrospected, current, and anticipated events. A greater or lesser amount of time reflects then a greater or lesser provision of resources, thereby representing a constraint that can greatly affect the ability to maintain a competitive advantage or ensure organizational survival. In the second study, the accuracy of the imitative process is varied to induce a flawless or flawed information diffusion system and, congruently, an efficient or inefficient communication network, in order to assess the effects of complexity and parallel problem-solving on autonomous search behaviour, clarify the core drivers of imitative behaviour, control for the degree of strategic diversity under different communication networks, and evaluate individual as well as collective performance conditional to the interaction between the levels of complexity and the modalities of parallel problem-solving. This is relevant for organizational science because imitating the practices of high-performing actors is one of the key strategies employed by organizations to solve complex problems and improve their performance, thereby representing a major part of the competitive process. The project is intended to contribute grounding individual and collective behaviour in a more psychologically and socially informed decision-making, with a view to further the research agenda of behavioral strategy and sustain the paradigm shift towards an evolutionary-complexity approach to real economic structures.

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Stark, Alyson N. "The Consequences of Increasing Ocean Acidification on Local and Global Fishing Industries." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2010. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/70.

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As human activities continue to generate accelerating levels of carbon dioxide emissions, the world’s oceanic resources are threatened by variability in seawater chemistry, known as ocean acidification. Recent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have resulted in decreased carbonate ion concentrations and ocean pH levels, leading to increasingly acidic waters. The exact consequences of these chemical changes on ecosystems and individual species are difficult to predict; however, research has shown that economically valuable calcifying species will experience reduced reproductive fitness and population declines. Ocean acidification, therefore, poses an immediate risk to both fish stocks and fishery industries. From a local perspective, individual regions will need to implement dynamic management strategies to prepare for anticipated economic consequences. In a global context, international cooperation is required for further research and collaborative efforts must be made to reduce future acidification.

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Pritzlaff, Richard G. "A Meta-Analysis of Successful Community-Based Payment for Ecosystem Services Programs." Thesis, Prescott College, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10822273.

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Ecosystem services (ES), payments for ecosystem services (PES), and the development of markets for PES are transformational concepts and practices that emerged from environmental and ecological economics. Although the establishment of regulatory markets tends to be “top down,” there is evidence that more locally acceptable and successful markets tend to come from the community, from the “bottom up.” This meta-analysis analyzes 20 recent articles that examined approximately 454 PES cases from around the world, most organized from the bottom up. Cross-case analysis reveals possible best practices. Involving communities in design, decision-making, governance, and operation of local PES programs is found in many cases to contribute to improvements in both ecosystems and community livelihoods. Devolving project administration and ES provision monitoring to the local level is found to lower costs, increase project legitimacy, community equity, and leaves efficiency and fairness tradeoff decision-making in the hands of local communities. This in turn adds to feelings of competence, autonomy, and control. The experience of cooperative learning, skill acquisition, and enhanced individual and community capacities that results from participation in PES program design is found to positively influence social, cultural, economic, and multilevel political dynamics, allowing local sustainable resource use and management to emerge. In several cases, there are indications that this leads to a changed local and regional political economy due to successful value capture of enhanced ES resulting from restored ecosystems, as well as indications of other transformative changes in communities. These findings are used to provide recommendations to a watershed restoration initiative in the borderlands of Southern Arizona.

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Kerr, Geoffrey N. "The economics of managing congestion: with special reference to backcountry recreation." Lincoln University, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10182/1971.

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The management of congestible recreation resources has been based largely on the concept of satisfaction. This concept is poorly defined and often does not reflect objectives for management of recreation resources. One way of addressing these problems is to define and use measurable objectives for management of recreation resources. One such objective is economic efficiency. The concept of efficiency is defined and economic theory developed to identify efficient allocations of congestible resources, the efficient capacities of resources under different allocation mechanisms, and the efficiency costs of use of lottery-based allocation mechanisms. The usefulness of this body of economic theory in allocation of backcountry recreational resources is addressed through investigation of ability to measure demand for congestible resources, and the problems associated with use of surrogate measures of demand. Theoretical models of efficient management of congestible resources cannot be applied with the current state of knowledge because existing non-market valuation methods are not able to identify Hicksian-compensated demand functions for congestible backcountry recreation. Use of Marshallian demand measures introduces the possibility of resource misallocations of unknown direction and magnitude.

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Childress, Ronald Jr. "Water Quality Trading Markets for the Kentucky River Basin: A Point Source Profile." UKnowledge, 2012. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/agecon_etds/8.

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This study assessed the feasibility and suitability of a Water Quality Trading (WQT) program within the Kentucky River Basin (KRB). The study’s focal point was based on five success factors of a WQT program: environmental suitability, geospatial orientation, participant availability, regulatory incentive, and economic incentive. The study utilized these five success factors, geographical characteristics, and Discharge Monitoring Reports (DMR) to assess the feasibility of a WQT program. The assessment divided the KRB into five eight digit Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC), North, Middle, and South Fork, Middle Basin, and Lower Basin, to determine regional impacts caused by the nutrient PSs. Individual nutrient profiles were generated to show the number of point sources (PS) operating in the KRB, their geospatial orientation to one another, and their permitted nutrient limits and nutrient discharges in form of total phosphorus (TP), total nitrogen (TN), and total nitrogen (as ammonia) (TA). Findings suggest trading is highly unlikely for TP and TN PSs due to the lack of regulatory standards, limited number of TN and TP PSs, and an inadequate demand for offset credits. Trading is also unlikely in all the HUC 8 watersheds except for the Lower Basin due to the lack of nutrient impaired waters. Key Words: Point Source, Non-Point Source, Water Quality Trading, TMDL, Impaired Waters

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Penn, Jerrod M. "ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES, STATED PREFERENCES, AND HYPOTHETICAL BIAS." UKnowledge, 2017. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/agecon_etds/57.

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Contingent Valuation (CV) methods are a primary tool in environmental economics to ascertain non-use or other values not observable through existing market mechanisms. Because common CV approaches typically rely on hypothetical answers from surveys in order to generate welfare estimates, these are often labelled stated preferences. Results from stated preference methods often diverge from those obtained when actual preference or behavior are involved. This divergence is commonly known as Hypothetical Bias (HB). This dissertation addresses HB as it applies to environmental applications. To begin, a meta-analysis using a sample of studies many times larger than previous works was performed. Its results identify which study protocols exacerbate HB, and which may mitigate it. Furthermore, the meta-analysis establishes the efficacy of some popular techniques to mitigate HB. The second essay focuses on understanding and addressing two important topics to environmental economics, distance decay and charismatic species conservation. These effects have not been investigated with respect to HB. We implement a field survey of monarch and viceroy butterfly conservation, creating survey treatment conditions involving both real payment and hypothetical scenarios in order to establish the extent of HB. The key finding is that while HB is present for both butterflies, HB in distance decay exists for monarchs. There is also additional HB for monarchs compared to viceroys, which we attribute to the former’s charisma. The final endeavor studies the usefulness of consequentiality, a relatively new tactic to reduce HB. Consequentiality is the degree to which respondents believe their answers may affect policy outcomes. Relying on the monarch field survey, we find that using a technique known as ex ante consequentiality may exacerbate HB. Another approach known as ex post consequentiality is more effective at reducing the extent of HB in the data. Lastly, some elements of the studies’ results showcase that HB is not always present and can also explain some of the mixed results found on the efficacy of HB mitigating methods reported in previous studies.

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Mekonnen, Kefyalew. "The economics of developing water resource projects in the Ethiopian Nile River basin : their environmental, and transboundary implications /." The economics of developing water resource projects in the Ethiopian Nile River basinRead the abstract of the thesis, 2003. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe17380.pdf.

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Allison, Isaiah. "Techno-economic evaluation of associated gas usage for gas turbine power generation in the presence of degradation & resource decline." Thesis, Cranfield University, 2014. http://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/9233.

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This research examined the technical and economic feasibility of harnessing flare gas emissions from oil fields. The outcome would provide the basis for a substantial re-utilization of this waste energy due to the current practice of flaring and use it alternatively as energy for powering oil fields, rural electrification and desalination. Nigeria is used as a case study. Burning fossil fuels have grave environmental impact, amidst increasing global concerns over harmful emissions. This research addresses resource decline and suggests divestment as a partial cure. The gas turbine is subject to degradation of its components as it is used. Though several methods of assessing gas turbine degradation have been developed with varying degrees of success, no one method has addressed issues pertaining to associated gas and its effects on degradation with divestment. Simulation of two single shaft, heavy duty industrial gas turbines; and three aero-derivative industrial gas turbines of the heavy medium and light capacity ranges were carried out for varying operating conditions, to ascertain the effects of degradation when run on associated gas. Thereafter, optimizations for the best power plant engine mix and the least cost of electricity were carried out. Genetic algorithm was used to assess a population of 10,000 individuals over 500 generations; convergence was achieved for different configurations of the five study engines at discount rates of 5% and 10%, over three power ranges. The divestment pattern starts with the lightest aero-derivative industrial gas turbine; the best power plant selection was limited to the two lightest aero-derivatives in the fleet, completely ignoring the heavy engines. A techno-economic, environmental and risk assessment model comprising performance, emission, economics and risk modules was successfully developed to assess gas turbine degradation with divestment. Using this tool, it was confirmed that associated gas usage resulted in degradation of gas turbine performance, an increase in gas collection as well as operation and maintenance costs. Also there was increasingly higher creep life consumption during slow, medium and fast degradation scenarios for both engine sets. The novel technical contribution of the research work therefore is the influence of degradation on the economic use of associated gas as fuel in gas turbine power generation; and the implementation of divestment in the face of fuel decline.

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Uehara, Takuro. "A Systems Approach to Ecological Economic Models Developed Progressively in Three Interwoven Articles." PDXScholar, 2012. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/553.

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My dissertation develops and analyzes ecological economic models to study the complex dynamics of an ecological economic system (EES) and investigate various conditions and measures which can sustain a developing economy over the long term in view of resilience and sustainability. Because of the intrinsic complexity of the system, I take a systems approach, using economics as the foundation for the basic structure of an ecological economic model, and system dynamics as the method to build and analyze such a complex ecological economic model. Throughout my dissertation, the model developed by Brander and Taylor (1998) is adopted as a baseline model (henceforth the BT model). The BT model explains population-resource dynamics and is characterized as a general equilibrium version of the Gordon-Schaefer Model, using a variation of the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model. The findings are presented as three articles. The first article provides a comprehensive analysis of the BT model and its descendants, to elicit directions for further research, including population growth logic, substitutability, innovation, capital accumulation, property rights and institutional designs, and modeling approach. The second article extends the BT model to study the resilience of an EES reflecting three key issues in modeling such systems: 1) appropriate system boundary, 2) non-convexity of ecosystems, and 3) adaptation. The article discusses two types of thresholds: the ecological threshold, a threshold for an ecological system independent of economic systems, and the ecological economic threshold, a threshold for an EES. The latter is often different from the former and is highly dynamic and context dependent. The third article is another extension of the BT model to study the sustainability of an EES by implementing the suggestions made by the first article except for property rights and institutional designs. The main focus is on the impact of endogenous innovation regarding input substitutability on the system sustainability. The main finding is that improvement in the input substitutability, ceteris paribus, may not contribute to sustainable development despite its contribution to expanding the economy. However, it could be possible for susbstitutability improvements to contribute to sustainable development when combined with other specific types of technological progress.

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Wood, Richard, Konstantin Stadler, Moana Simas, Tatyana Bulavskaya, Stefan Giljum, Franz Stephan Lutter, and Arnold Tukker. "Growth in Environmental Footprints and Environmental Impacts Embodied in Trade: Resource Efficiency Indicators from EXIOBASE3." Wiley, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12735.

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Most countries show a relative decoupling of economic growth from domestic resource use, implying increased resource efficiency. However, international trade facilitates the exchange of products between regions with disparate resource productivity. Hence, for an understanding of resource efficiency from a consumption perspective that takes into account the impacts in the upstream supply chains, there is a need to assess the environmental pressures embodied in trade. We use EXIOBASE3, a new multiregional input-output database, to examine the rate of increase in resource efficiency, and investigate the ways in which international trade contributes to the displacement of pressures on the environment from the consumption of a population. We look at the environmental pressures of energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, material use, water use, and land use. Material use stands out as the only indicator growing in both absolute and relative terms to population and gross domestic product (GDP), while land use is the only indicator showing absolute decoupling from both references. Energy, GHG, and water use show relative decoupling. As a percentage of total global environmental pressure, we calculate the net impact displaced through trade rising from 23% to 32% for material use (1995¿2011), 23% to 26% for water use, 20% to 29% for energy use, 20% to 26% for land use, and 19% to 24% for GHG emissions. The results show a substantial disparity between trade-related impacts for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries. At the product group level, we observe the most rapid growth in environmental footprints in clothing and footwear. The analysis points to implications for future policies aiming to achieve environmental targets, while fully considering potential displacement effects through international trade.

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Stauth, Roy Bryan. "An environmental evaluation methodology for improving resource allocation decisions : a treatise with selected South African case studies." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18594.

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This dissertation addresses the problem of how to manage environmental resources to improve the prospects that resource allocation activities will make the greatest possible contribution to social well-being. The study had two major aims. One aim was to provide a rational philosophical framework for guiding resource evaluation and decisionmaking processes. The second - and principal - aim was to develop a reliable and practical method for evaluating those resource allocation proposals which are particularly controversial. As part of the philosophical framework, a modification of the social welfare function is specified which explicitly addresses the well-being of future generations. This form of the social welfare function is based on certain a priori premises, which are used to define the goal and objectives of resource allocation, and to identify appropriate evaluation criteria. These evaluation criteria are then used to devise a resource management strategy and to develop an environmental evaluation methodology to serve that strategy. The methodology consists of both formal and informal methods of evaluation, but special attention is given to developing a formal method of evaluation that is simple and inexpensive to apply, and therefore particularly suited for Third World conditions. The principal research objective was to develop a useful method for evaluating those resource allocation proposals which are especially controversial. The method that has been developed - the Panel Evaluation Method - utilizes a cost-benefit framework and employs procedures modeled on the Delphi Method. The Panel Evaluation Method features three techniques for accomplishing a formal evaluation of competing proposals: the Impact Identification Technique is used to identify and define all the impacts of concern; the Significance Measurement Technique is used to judge the relative significance of the impacts; and the Criteria Trade-off Technique is used to determine which proposal best satisfies specified evaluation criteria. The Panel Evaluation Method was applied to several case studies with positive results. For example, the central feature of the method - the Significance Measurement Technique - was found to be capable of producing reasonably replicable results, and so is considered to provide an acceptable way to determine whether the costs of a proposal would exceed its benefits. The method thus serves to extend the capabilities of both Environmental Impact Assessment and Cost-benefit Analysis, and to link these two widely-used tools for guiding resource allocation decisions into a more powerful and versatile decisionmaking tool.

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Talbot-Jones, Julia. "The Institutional Economics of Granting a River Legal Standing." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/132935.

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The governance of water is of increasing concern to policy analysts. Several property rights systems, which allow for ownership of water by the individual, community, or state have been advocated, but no approach has been uniformly successful in resolving water quality or scarcity issues. In some cases, identifying alternative property rights arrangements for governing water systems could be useful. This research examines how a river system can be granted legal standing and the institutional economic effects of doing so. It is the first academic treatment of this subject. Focusing on the case of the Whanganui River, New Zealand, a careful critique of the new property rights arrangement - termed resource self-determination - is given. Using Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, game theory, and economic experiments, the economic and socio-ecological outcomes observed under state ownership are compared with the outcomes expected under resource self-determination. To understand how and why the new property rights approach was identified for the Whanganui River, a critical analysis of the institutional variables central to the identification of resource self-determination is also undertaken using a new dynamic version of the IAD framework developed as part of this research. The results of the study suggest that the implementation of resource self-determination is likely to result in an increase in transaction costs and a redistribution of water within the system, but that the new framework could successfully deliver on the objectives of the new legislation. For policy makers interested in replicating the approach for other river systems, words of caution, as well as recommendations, are offered.

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Algermissen, Gordon H. "California Water Management: Establishing a Framework for an Efficient Future." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/733.

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Water management in California is an extremely complex issue that requires collaboration from all levels of government. As the water supply shrinks and demand pressures increase over the next century, water management will become increasingly difficult. There is no single solution to the water issues facing California but there are many incremental steps than can be taken to secure an efficient, sustainable, and environmentally friendly economy. Water conservation programs appear to be the most cost effective means of reducing water demand. This requires a combination of incentives to reduce consumption, education about the true cost of water for California, and regulatory reform to promote efficient use and distribution of water. The state needs to make investments in education about water in California for conservation measures to be successfully adopted and implemented by the general populace. From a policy perspective, higher levels of government in the state need to establish statewide performance standards for groundwater withdrawals, point and non-point pollution, flood risk, and watershed integration for local governments to enforce. In order for these changes in water policy to be implemented, strong leadership is necessary.

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Herzberg, Julika Verfasser], Oliver [Akademischer Betreuer] [Lorz, and Thomas S. [Akademischer Betreuer] Lontzek. "Essays on environmental and resource economics: evaluation of voluntary and mandatory policies / Julika Herzberg ; Jens Oliver Lorz, Thomas S. Lontzek." Aachen : Universitätsbibliothek der RWTH Aachen, 2019. http://d-nb.info/1238149499/34.

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Ouellette, Kayla. "Agriculture, Environmental Restoration and Ecosystem Services: Assessing the Costs of Water Storage on Agricultural Lands in South Florida." Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5090.

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A large part of the environmental restoration required by the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan calls for more water-storage on lands south of Lake Okeechobee in order to restore the natural water flows of the Everglades watershed. The Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) can be used for increased water storage in order to relieve coastal estuaries of excess water in the rainy season. This water storage can deliver additional ecosystem services of soil retention and reduced CO2 emissions that could compensate farmers for the cost of water storage by increasing long term farm profitability. The goals of this study were 1) to quantify the environmental and economic trade-offs of different water storage scenarios using water-tolerant sugarcane cultivars, and 2) to quantify the amount of water storage possible in the EAA under different water storage scenarios. A mathematical model was developed to calculate soil depth, soil subsidence, depth to the water table, sugarcane production, farm return, water storage and carbon loss for three different sugarcane cultivars with different water-tolerances. A GIS tool is also developed to estimate the amount of water storage possible in the EAA. The study found that even though water-tolerant sugarcane cultivars experience higher yields and net returns than non-water-tolerant cultivars the water storage costs with these water tolerant cultivars was greater. Raising water tables on farm lands did have the environmental benefits of reduced soil subsidence, extended farm life and increased years of water storage. However total CO2 emissions rise from 14 to 136%. Results of the GIS analysis revealed that water storage capacity for a DWT of 61 cm is 1,404,562 ac-ft, 1,417,400 ac-ft for DWT 45 cm and 1,474,692 ac-ft for DWT 20 cm. The GIS analysis was also able to identify flow ways that could possibly carry water south from Lake Okeechobee and ultimately to the WCAs south of the EAA. These results show that raising water tables in the EAA to deliver the ecosystem service of expanded water storage is overall more costly, but yearly costs are very low. Therefore water storage on farmlands is an affordable interim method of water storage.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Environment and resource economics'

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