Do voluntary environmental management systems improve Environmental performance? Evidence from waste management by Kenyan firms.
EfD Authors:
We examine whether the adoption of global voluntary environmental management systems - United Nations Global Compact and ISO 14001 - lead to more effective environmental performance. Previous studies have presented inconclusive findings of voluntary environmental management systems on environmental performances. Possible reasons for conflicting results are the influence of observable and unobservable factors that affect environmental performance as well as the use of different measures of environmental performance indicators.
Valuing water purification services of forests in China's Sichuan province
EfD Authors:
It is widely believed that forests help improve water quality by reducing soil erosion (and hence reducing silt) as well as filtering out nutrients and pollutants carried in water, which allows the municipal drinking water supply sector to simplify or expedite many costly water treatment procedures and thereby save on operating costs. This study statistically quantifies such cost savings in the contexts of China’s Sichuan province, by analyzing how drinking water treatment costs change in response to changes in upstream forest cover.
Value of cleaner neighborhoods: Application of hedonic price model in low income context
EfD Authors:
Municipal solid waste management is a challenging issue in developing countries. An unclean neighborhood could have a significant negative impact on housing property values too as it may lead to numerous diseases in addition to diminished aesthetic value. This study examines the effects of municipal solid waste collection services at the neighborhood level on housing property values using the hedonic price model. We use a sub-sample of nationally representative household survey data from urban areas as well as primary data collected from one of the metropolitan cities in Nepal.
Distributional Statistics of Municipal Water Use During Cape Town’s Drought: Implications for Affordability, Conservation and Tariff Design 20-23
EfD Authors:
We calculate the first distributional statistics for municipal water supply deliveries using 14.9 million monthly billing records for a half-million households in Cape Town, South Africa, from 2014-2018. These years span a historic drought and a multi-faceted package of conservation programs that achieved a 50% city-wide drop in consumption. We find that the top 10% of households consumed 31% of water deliveries before the drought, with the Gini coefficient
Watering Down Environmental Regulation in China
EfD Authors:
This paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a spatial regression discontinuity design implicit in China’s water quality monitoring system. Because water quality readings are important for political evaluations, and the monitoring stations only capture emissions from their upstream regions, local government officials are incentivized to enforce tighter environmental standards on firms immediately upstream of a monitoring station, rather than those immediately downstream.
COVID-19 and Handwashing: Implications for Water Use in Sub-Saharan Africa 20-18
Because the main modes of transmission of the COVID-19 virus are respiration and contact, WHO recommends frequent washing of hands with soap under running water for at least 20 seconds. This article investigates how the level of concern about COVID-19 affects the likelihood of washing hands frequently in sub-Saharan Africa. The study makes use of a unique survey dataset from 12 sub-Saharan African countries collected in April 2020 (first round) and May 2020 (second round) and employs an extended ordered probit model with an endogenous covariate.
The Impact of Forest and Non-Forest Land Cover on Potable Water Treatment Costs
EfD Authors:
Access to clean water is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to be achieved by 2030, and a priority on the environmental policy agenda in Ethiopia. A main challenge for clean water supply utilities is how to accommodate watershed protection and management costs. The type of land cover around water sources has a notable effect on the cleanliness of the water and hence on water purifying costs.