World Development Sustainability最新文献

This study addressed the distributional challenges associated with renewable energy development. In the U.S., wind energy has become the most prevalent renewable energy source, offering significant advantages in decarbonization, economic growth, and access to affordable clean energy. However, concerns emerged regarding the distributional consequences of wind energy development. This study aimed to empirically examine (i) the impact of wind energy projects on income inequality and (ii) any significant trends in this impact from a spatial–temporal perspective. To achieve this, we constructed a new variable to measure wind energy development at the U.S. county level across four periods (2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019). To address potential endogeneity, we employed Instrumental Variable Two-Stage Least Squares (IV-2SLS) regression with three geophysical variables on wind resource capacity. After combining the data collected from the American Community Survey (ACS), our analysis revealed that wind energy development had a consistently positive and significant impact on income inequality. However, the effect diminished in magnitude over time as wind energy projects expanded, indicating an optimistic outlook for renewable energy development. In light of these findings, we discussed potential mechanisms for the positive effect, such as employment, land lease payment, and tax revenue, and their policy implications.

From 1980 through 2020, the rate of population growth declined in both China and India, but the decline was far more pronounced in China. During the same period, per capita income increased substantially in both China and India, but the increase was far more pronounced in China. The fact that China and India are similar in many important respects (ancient cultures, large populations, etc.), but implemented substantially different population control policies during the 1980–2020 interval, suggests an equivalence to a quasi-controlled experiment, of the sort that very rarely occurs in the real world. The control would be India, with a relatively conventional population control policy, and the experiment would be China, with its relatively drastic population control policy. This research investigates the possibility of a causal relation between differential population growth and differential economic growth in China and India. It is shown that the simulation of a basic economic growth model in which population growth is a key exogenous determinant, and which utilizes the same economic relationships and numerical parameter values for both China and India, produces time paths of growth in per capita income that closely resemble the empirical Chinese and Indian time paths. This finding supports the hypothesis that a significant factor in China's remarkable economic growth over the last four decades has been its equally remarkable population control policy.

Despite its economic potential, oil palm has earned a bad reputation for its negative environmental and mixed social impacts. In the Eastern Brazilian Amazon, oil palm production has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Meanwhile, in the same landscape, Agroforestry Systems (AFS) have been widely promoted as a solution to achieve economic growth coupled with socio-environmental benefits for smallholders. Our study seeks to shed light on pathways for reconciling oil palm production with farmer livelihoods. We randomly sampled 198 smallholders in the municipality of Tomé-Açu, Pará, Brazil. Our findings point to diverse livelihoods and widely varying yearly income, averaging USD 13,100. Different types of AFS were adopted by 85 % of farmers in our sample, in contrast to just 11 % adopting monocrop oil palm. Almost one third of on-farm income and produced food came from AFS, which mostly contributed to achieving life aspirations. Key indicators on financial and physical capitals (technology level, housing, total income and land size) indicate economic success as most households achieved intermediate levels of living standard. We conclude that family farmers can successfully adopt AFS and that oil palm producers overall are less likely to have low economic success. An overwhelming majority of farmers would like to expand their AFS, but very few would choose to include oil palm. We argue that the expansion of oil palm-based AFS hinges on the extent to which the prevailing business model and technological package can provide sufficient resources to reduce family farmer risks, including: credit conditions, plantation size, species selection and systems suited to farmer livelihood objectives and constraints.

The rise of Global China or the rapid expansion of Chinese influence abroad has had a commensurate impact on transnational trade and related commercial pressure in the governance of natural resources in Africa. Rosewood with its direct link to China's cultural renaissance has had a boost in extractivism in tropical regions. Taking inspiration from common property theory and based on empirical research conducted in Ghana in 2022, we analyze the effect of the Ghana-China rosewood trade on the governance of rosewood as a ‘common-pool’ resource in rural Ghana. Our research broadly responds to the question of how the Ghana-China rosewood trade changes formal and informal governance arrangements in rural Ghana. In a constructive light, the study demonstrates how one community created rules to access rosewood on community lands. The results also show that more challenging influences of rosewood trade on land boundary disputes resulting from violent protests of existing rules and norms, including customary rights, contestation of rural authorities, rural leadership manoeuvrings, and corruption are increasingly prevalent since the boom in the rosewood trade at the local level. This study contributes to the debate on common-pool resources, demonstrating that with the right information and communication network, rural people can self-govern common-pool resources to their advantage despite the alarming influences that external factors pose. From a China-Africa relations perspective, this work contributes to the politics of natural resources in the context of the increasing global influence of China in Africa.

Discrimination against women in agricultural decision-making is a major threat to the empowerment of women in many developing countries where agriculture is not only the major source of livelihood, at times the only source of livelihood. It hampers their socio-economic status as well as the overall economic development of the country. The objective of this paper is to understand the gendered perspective of agricultural decision-making in one of the eastern states of India, i.e., Odisha by analysing the primary data collected through a structured schedule from 996 agrarian households. This paper, by using multinomial logit model, concludes that land ownership exclusively by females raises their decision-making power with respect to all agricultural activities in the household. Joint ownership of land by both men and women and the use of modern technology in farm activities also raise the agrarian decision-making power of the females. Further, the decision-making power of women is more among the socially marginalised and economically deprived categories. This calls for institutional arrangements to ensure land ownership by the female members and their economic empowerment by providing them better wages and livelihood.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries continue to suffer from energy poverty, with 35 % and 19 % of the average population, having access to electricity and clean fuels for cooking technologies, respectively. This study examines whether access to electricity and clean fuels for cooking and technology improves or worsens health outcomes (i.e. infant, child and maternal mortality) in 48 sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2020. We applied panel quantile regression to estimate the impact of access to electricity, and clean fuels for cooking on health outcomes while controlling for health care expenditure and income, using lagged explanatory variables as instruments to eliminate endogeneity. To ensure the robustness of the results, we also employed the Kernel-based Regularized Least Squares (KRLS), a machine learning technique. Our results show that access to electricity reduce infant, child, and maternal mortality across all quantiles (i.e., the 25th, 50th, 60th, 75th and 90th). Similarly, clean fuels for cooking and technologies reduce maternal, infant and child mortality to most quantiles. This indicates that increased access to electricity, clean fuels for cooking and technologies will have a significant impact on reducing child, infant and maternal mortality in SSA. The findings also reveal that clean fuels for cooking and technologies increase both infant and under-five mortality in certain quantiles. This is likely due to the fact that cooking is also a leading cause of house fires, killing both infants and children under the age of five. Therefore, it is crucial to prioritize home cooking safety measures to prevent unnecessary deaths of infants and children. Our study suggests short-and long-term energy policies to address energy poverty and ultimately improve population health in SSA.

This study investigates the link between household welfare and solar electricity demand in sub-Saharan Africa for the period between 2010 and 2019. Welfare was proxied by HDI, inequality in income, infant mortality, education, mobile phone subscriptions, internet users and unemployment rate. The study employed a Quantile regression with nonadditive fixed effects and the adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo optimisation method. The findings show that HDI has a negative and significant effect on solar electricity consumption at all quantiles except for the 30th quantile where the effect is positive. This implies that as welfare improves, consumers’ demand for solar electricity declines due to a shift to other fuels or stacking of multiple fuels. Moreover, the findings show varying effects of inequality in income, education, mobile phone subscriptions, internet connectivity and unemployment rate on solar electricity demand at different quantiles. Lastly, the findings reveal that infant mortality has a negative effect on solar electricity demand across all quantiles. In overall, the findings imply that policy makers should develop strategies that will promote and incentivise solar electricity consumption across all income groups.

Air pollution is a known health hazard, and evidence of negative effects beyond the health dimension is rapidly emerging. This paper studies the effect on one non-health dimension, namely cognitive performance. It exploits exogenous variation in exposure to air pollution during secondary school exams and estimate the contemporaneous effect on students’ cognitive performance in Colombia between 2012 and 2018. The results indicate that exposure to air pollution on the day of the exam itself negatively impacts students’ performance. Using variation in wind direction as an instrument for air pollution, I find that a one standard deviation increase in air pollution reduces overall test scores by 0.05 standard deviations. For students who continue to tertiary education, there is no evidence that this distorted signal of their cognitive abilities at the secondary school exam translates into differences in college attendance, as proxied by college graduation rates.

Land use (LU) policies exert a profound influence on socio-economic dynamics. However, the intricate relationship between these two aspects has yet to receive comprehensive examination, especially when focusing on specific LU types and smaller-scale geographical regions. We, therefore, elucidate the complex interplay between economic development, urbanization levels, and LU changes, drawing from extensive datasets concerning LU and economic activities in Shaanxi, China. This region holds particular significance as it represents an emerging economy with a strategic role in the national economic landscape. The LU change was assessed by two indicators, comprehensive index of land use degree (CILUD) and single land use dynamic degree (SLUDD). Three findings were yielded. First, the rapid progress in socio-economic indicators is significantly underpinned by environmentally sustainable economic development practices, thereby underscoring the potential resolution of the perennial dilemma between economic growth and environmental conservation. Second, the tension between the conversion of arable land and the process of urbanization, which stimulates regional economic growth, poses a considerable challenge to maintaining sustainable agriculture and ensuring future food security. Third, the reserved land area should not be occupied without constrains for inland regions. We consequently propose suggestions aimed at addressing these dilemmas by constructing environment-friendly economy, halting urbanization expansion by increasing LU density, halting the occupation of reserved land, and increasing cropping efficiency. Together, these strategies potentially do not only advance progress towards the Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals but also greatly boost the regional economy.

This study unfolds inverted -U nexus between female labour and political globalization through the lens of autoregressive distributed lag bounds test approach based on annual data from 1984 -2019 in Bangladesh. Political globalization initially fosters female workforce and after attaining a maximum threshold level, this slowly declines. This reinforces the evidence that, initially female absorption in labour market ascends via creation of employment opportunities in service sector for educated female labour and in industrial sector for the less educated. Consequently, the demand for female labour reduces significantly as the country becomes reliant more on import- based automated industries. This non- linear quadratic inverted U relation holds in short run and in the long run. This study also divulges that social globalization has negative and significant impact on female labour in the short- run, possibly corroborating persistent gender inequality in ICT for uneducated female labour. This research disentangles that interactive term of political and social globalization has positive and significant impact on female labour in the short- run. This positive effect is strongly significant in long run as well, supporting the fact that political globalization has the moderating role to subside gender disparity in the ICT sector for educated women. This research obtains conclusive evidence for stable long run inverted U relation between female labour and political globalization. This co-integrating relation holds under presumption of endogenous structural break. Findings of this study are important for formulating right policies to promote female labour in Bangladesh.