Village democratization in rural China is found to have profound impacts on many socio-economic aspects, but little is understood as to how welfare impacts may occur through farmers' principal production activities. This study helps to fill this gap by investigating how village democracy affects rural household welfare through these channels, using a unique household survey. The authors first establish a theoretical framework that links democracy to household welfare through changes in production efficiency.

Costa Rica is considering expanding their marine protected areas (MPAs) to conserve marine resources. Due to the importance of households’ responses to an MPA in defining the MPA’s ecological and economic outcomes, this paper uses an economic decision framework to interpret data from near-MPA household surveys to inform this policy discussion. The model and data suggest that the impact of expanding MPAs relies on levels of enforcement and on-shore wages.

This paper uses a bio-economic model to analyze wildlife conservation in two habitats adjacent to a national park by two types of communities in Zimbabwe. One community is made up of peasant farmers operating under a benefit-sharing scheme such as CAMPFIRE, while the other is made up of commercial farmers practicing game farming in a conservancy. Both communities exploit wildlife by selling hunting licenses to foreign hunters but with different levels of success. The park agency plays a central role by authorizing the harvest quota for each community.

This article investigates the impact of an institutional intervention on market efficiency in Ethiopia. More specifically, it analyzes to what extent the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in combination with regional warehouses have contributed to a reduction in price spreads between regional markets. The hypothesis is that warehouses connected to the ECX reduce the dispersion between export prices and local retail prices in different coffee growing areas, as well as the dispersion between export prices and local retail prices in different coffee growing areas.

Since 2006, China began a property reform on rural forest land, which is called "the second land reform" after the implementation of China's rural household contract responsibility system. Using a unique household survey data, we analyze the impact of grassroots democratic decision-making on investment incentives of the property right reform on forest land.

This paper develops a stochastic dynamic programming model to investigate a type of dynamic
enforcement strategy where the penalties for violations of environmental regulations are based on not only the current level of violations but also the firms’ past noncompliance records. The results show that firms’ optimal level of noncompliance would be a decreasing function of their accumulated

This study used a sample of 336 households and community-level data from 30 communities around Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe to analyse the association between institutions and cooperation (defined as the ability to self-organise) and the relationship between cooperation and success of biodiversity outcomes.

Land conflicts can be detrimental. An important goal of development policy is to help define and instill respect for borders. This is often implemented through mandatory and expensive interventions that rely on the expansion of government land administration institutions.

The paper provides and tests empirically a conditional resource curse theory, postulating that the relative effectiveness of the contenders plays a crucial role in determining whether resources are a curse or a blessing.

This paper examines the implications for Egypt and Sudan of the development of Blue Nile water resources by Ethiopia. The long-term development program produced between 1958 and 1963 by the Ethiopian government in collaboration with the US Bureau of Reclamation is summarized.

A linear programming model is used to examine the
effects on Egypt and Sudan of implementing this program. It is found
that water for agricultural use in Egypt and Sudan would actually
increase, though there would be some adverse consequences for Egypt.