In the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), both the goods being valued and the payment vehicles used to value them are mostly hypothetical. However, although numerous studies have examined the impact of experience with the good on the willingness to pay, less attention has been given to experience with the payment vehicles. This paper examines how experience with payment vehicles influences responses to a CV scenario on the maintenance of irrigation canals.

Does relative income have an impact on subjective well-being among extremely poor people? Contrary to the findings in developed countries, where relative income has shown a significant and negative impact on subjective well-being, this study (based on different definitions of reference groups) suggests that relative income does not affect subjective well-being among the very poor people in northern Ethiopia.

Using a random sample of individuals in rural Bangladesh, this paper investigates people's ethical preferences regarding relative values of lives when it comes to saving lives of individuals of different ages. By assuming that an individual has preferences concerning different states of the world, and that these preferences can be described by an individual social welfare function, the individuals' preferences for life-saving programs are elicited using a pair-wise choice experiment involving different life-saving programs.

Everyone wants to blame the undervalued Yuan for global problems. Economists have claimed it will prolong the global recession. Pundits link the export-driven economy to lax environmental regulations and low labor standards. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called it a contributing factor in a round of capital controls and currency-market interventions by emerging economies.

For as much heat as the Yuan is getting, you’d think it was responsible for global warming.

A review by the CO2Scorecard Group has revealed substantial discrepancies between the top publicly available global databases of CO2 emissions.

It has been widely reviewed, reported, and vociferously condemned that the World Bank Group (WBG) is investing heavily in coal. In South Africa, Botswana and India, the Bank has issued over $4 billion in loans for new coal-fired power plants since 2008. As a result, the Bank’s brand name is now tied to more than a billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next four to five decades.

Policy makers are under increasing pressure to deliver policies that not only foster employment and growth but also are environmentally sustainable. Green growth seeks for even more ambitious results where employment and growth are stimulated by technological and institutional changes arising from better environmental stewardship and adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. As green growth may become the growth paradigm for the 21st century, policy makers require policy tools for addressing this challenge.

We conducted a survey in the Guangdong province in China to measure happiness among preadolescents and their parents. The objective of this study was to investigate what explains preadolescents’ happiness level and whether their happiness is related to the happiness level of their parents. We do not find any significant relationship with respect to the latter, and the factors that explain the variation in happiness among parents do not explain the variation among children.

A personal carbon allowance (PCA) scheme targets emissions from individual consumption and allocates allowances directly to individuals by dividing the carbon budget on a per capita basis. In this study we analyse the results of a survey sent out to a representative sample of the Swedish population regarding attitudes to a potential PCA scheme.

This report reviews the current status of second generation biofuels. First generation biofuels continue to be substantially subsidized, and this has contributed to the increasing use of such fuel. However, recent studies claim that the future of biofuels lies in second generation biofuels, in particular biochemical ethanol made from cellulose.