Climate change represents a serious threat to the economic growth potential in low income countries. Instead of investing in growth, they may be drawn into strife and conflict. Climate change and the global politics to deal with it, could however also present a number of interesting opportunities for developing countries.
This paper presents an empirical analysis of the role of different climate change adaptation strategies in supporting food productivity in Ethiopia. The analysis relies on unique primary survey data on 1000 farms producing cereal crops in the Nile Basin, Ethiopia.
Costa Rica: National level assessment of the role of economic instruments in the conservation policymix
POLICYMIX aims to contribute to achieving the EUs goals of reversing trends in biodiversity loss beyond 2010 through the use of cost-effective and incentive-compatible economic instruments. POLICYMIX focuses on the role of economic instruments in a mix of operational conservation policy instruments. The project includes seven case studies from six countries: Norway, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Brazil (Mato Grosso and Mata Atlantica) and Costa Rica.
Eco-certification of coffee, timber and other high-value agricultural commodities is increasingly widespread. In principle, it can improve commodity producers' environmental performance, even in countries where state regulation is weak. But eco-certification will have limited environmental benefits if, as one would expect, it disproportionately selects for producers already meeting certification standards.
The efficient governance of information-production is analysed in the context of the bio-technology industry. Here primary R&D generates pure abstract information on the nature of biological solution concepts, while secondary R&D generates commercial products marketable to consumers.
This paper analyzes the interaction between North (technology rich and gene poor) and South (gene rich but technology poor) in relation to bioprospecting in the life sciences industries. This sector is modeled as a vertical industry with a sequential R and D process where both contributions from North and South are necessary to develop new drugs.
To the extent that diversifying income portfolio is used as a strategy for shielding against production risk, both individual risk aversion and weather uncertainty could affect crop diversification decisions. This paper is concerned with empirically assessing the effects of risk aversion and rainfall variability on farm level diversity.
This paper presents an empirical analysis of the impact of climate change on agriculture in a typical developing country. The economic implications of climate change are estimated by using both a farm productivity and a Ricardian framework.
China is increasingly suffering from ‘growing pains’ of severe environmental challenges arising during the past decades’ economic boom (Fu et al, 2007; Liu and Diamond, 2008). While this has been widely discussed, more attention and effort has been focused on the problems directly resulting from urbanization and industrialization, such as growing greenhouse gas emissions and worsening urban air and water quality
The economics of climate change and the various measures that should be implemented to reduce future damages are highly tied to the use of cost-benefit analysis. Traditional approaches ignore the fact that environmental amenities do not experience the same growth rate as do most of the sectors in the economy, which leads to changing relative prices. Uncertainty should also be considered, especially when one is conducting cost-benefit analysis involving the long-run damages from climate change.