Environmental and Resource Economics最新文献

Standard climate economics considers damages of climate change to utility, total factor productivity, and capital. Highlighting that air pollution and climate change affect human health and labor productivity significantly, we complement this literature by including human health in a theoretical climate economic framework. Our macroeconomic approach incorporates a separate health sector and provides closed-form analytical solutions for the main model variables. Economic growth is endogenously driven by innovations, which depend on labor availability and productivity. These aspects of the labor force are directly linked to human health, which is harmed by burning fossil fuels. We calculate growth in the decentralized equilibrium and derive optimal climate policy. Calibrating the model by taking standard parameter values we show the economic growth rate to be higher for the planner solution compared to the market outcome. For an optimal climate policy, we find that 44% of total resource stock should be extracted when considering damages to capital, but only 1% of the stock should be extracted in an “all inclusive” approach where health damages are included. The health perspective requires optimal environmental policies that are much more stringent than those normally advocated in climate economics, since harm to human health has negative effects on economic growth, which makes the overall impact of climate change very large.

In the debate on international waste trade, the focus on resource efficiency and recycling has gradually begun to accompany the focus on negative environmental externalities. In this context, we examine the impact of extended producer responsibility (EPR) on the export of waste batteries (WB). EPR is considered as a key policy for the “marketization of waste”. WB are a hazardous waste that also contain a high concentration of critical raw materials. As such, they are of strategic importance for the recovery of critical resources, while at the same time requiring proper environmental management. Therefore, it is crucial to understand where WB are treated and how this is affected by related policies. Our results, based on difference-in-difference models in a gravity framework, show a consistent increase in WB exports after EPR implementation compared to the trend for other wastes. This result is likely to be an indirect consequence of the ability of EPR to support growth in waste collection rates, more accurate tracking of transboundary waste flows, and specialization of national waste management systems. In particular, WB exports appear to be directed to countries with more advanced waste management systems, more stringent environmental regulations, and limited endowments of the mineral resources typically contained in batteries.

This paper investigates the impact of trade-related illicit financial flows (IFFs) on tropical deforestation. To adjust for pre-exposure differences in deforestation rates between countries exposed to IFFs and their counterfactuals, this study adopts propensity score matching and doubly robust weighted regression estimators. The results suggest substantial increases in forest loss in countries exposed to large IFFs. Specifically, the treated countries exposed to IFFs experience an annual increase in forest loss of approximately 10,344.167 hectares compared to their counterfactual controls. This finding is largely driven by macro-financial instability resulting from real currency depreciation and tax revenue losses due to illicit financial outflows. The results highlight the merit of capital controls and state ownership of assets in mitigating the impact of exposure to IFFs on forest loss.

Renewable energy projects are subject to risk due to the uncertainty of future electricity prices and the amount of energy produced. Public support usually consists of some form of guarantee, either on the price received per MWh supplied or the return on investment per MW installed. This support reduces the investor’s risk, which is then assumed by the regulator. However, most of these policies do not only grant the investor the right to receive a guaranteed payment but also limit its potential benefits (i.e., impose an obligation). We propose a model with analytical solutions in which, considering the randomness of the market price, as well as that of the energy production, we quantify the risk removed under different types of regulations and assign a value to both the rights and the obligations that each policy entails. Finally, we apply the model to the case of Spain, which has undergone several changes in its green energy support system in recent years. Our results indicate that in the context of low electricity prices, the obligations imposed by most of these policies are negligible compared to the rights received. By contrast, in the context of high electricity prices and increasingly competitive renewable energy sources, the assumed obligations become more notable to the point of the support policy becoming a liability. Nevertheless, a sufficiently risk-averse investor may be incentivized by a policy with negative expected regulatory costs.

We consider a firm’s incentive for foreign direct investment (FDI) and international technology licensing in a polluting industry. We explain the rationale and the welfare implications of complementarity between FDI and licensing, i.e., the firm’s strategy of “FDI and licensing” (FL), which is empirically relevant but ignored in the literature. When the environmental tax cannot be committed, the firm adopts the licensing strategy if the pollution intensity is not high, and the licensing strategy may create lower consumer surplus and welfare compared to both FDI and FL. However, if the pollution intensity is high, the firm undertakes FL, which provide higher consumer surplus and welfare compared to both licensing and FDI. When the government can commit to the environmental tax, the firm always prefers FL. The host-country welfare is higher but the consumer surplus and world welfare may be lower under the committed tax policy compared to the non-committed tax policy. These results hold under Cournot competition and Stackelberg competition. We further show that FL can be the equilibrium strategy of the foreign firm if there is fixed-fee licensing instead of a two-part tariff licensing, which is considered in the main analysis.

This paper uses time-varying smooth transition autoregressive model to investigate the asymmetric nature of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) —an exogenous climatic factor—with respect to the nonlinear dynamics of food prices in sub-Saharan Africa. Curating food price series from more than 1100 markets from 36 SSA countries, the study finds that ENSO (linearly or nonlinearly) affects roughly half of food prices considered, with most nonlinear models exhibiting strong asymmetric properties with shock-inflicted persistence. Moreover, in terms of the location of the burden of ENSO impact, I find a geographical and food product divide. Specifically, ENSO appears to be more efficacious on maize prices in Southern, Eastern, and some parts of Central Africa. Conversely, local rice, cassava, millet, and animal products are least affected. The policy implication of this dichotomy is that response to ENSO news should be subregion-specific rather than region-specific, depending on how the subregions absorb the shock.

Recent studies demonstrated that green innovation and environment-related technologies reduce energy intensity and improve energy efficiency, contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions. However, the existing studies employ linear estimation methods to examine the relationship between green innovation and energy intensity and do not consider the indirect implications of institutional quality for the effect of green technology on energy intensity. Institutional quality is found to be an essential driver of innovation, and countries may need to achieve at least a minimum level of institutional quality to promote green innovation and improve their energy intensity. To test this hypothesis, this paper examines the relationship between energy intensity and green innovation using a panel dataset from 72 countries between 1996 and 2017 and a panel threshold model when institutional quality is considered a threshold variable. The findings highlight that green innovation reduces the energy intensity if and only if countries surpass a certain threshold of institutional quality. Therefore, countries need to improve their institutional quality to promote green innovation and benefit from green technologies in improving their energy intensity.

Combining detailed county-to-county migration data with Toxics Release Inventory data, and fine-scale (hbox{PM}_{2.5}) concentration levels, we investigate the relationship between internal migration, income of migrant and non-migrant households and county-level differences in environmental quality. We show that households moving to “cleaner” counties are relatively “richer”—a result consistent with a sorting by income in the spirit of Tiebout (1956). An implication of this finding is that internal migration could contribute to the persistence of disparities in pollution exposure at the county-level.

Faced with a global emissions problem such as climate change, we know that if countries’ emissions decisions are made in an independent and self-interested fashion the outcome can be very far from optimal. One proposed solution is to have countries enter international environmental agreements (IEAs) whereby individual countries’ emissions decisions are taken in the interests of all the participating countries and so reflect a degree of altruism. However, if the decision to co-operate is made in a self-interested fashion the standard non-cooperative model of IEAs yields the pessimistic conclusion that the more serious the environmental problem the smaller will be the equilibrium membership of an IEA. Our paper examines the implications for emissions, IEA membership and welfare of assuming that countries make both emissions and IEA membership decisions in the alternative moral fashion of acting as imperfect Kantians as defined by Alger and Weibull (Econometrica 81:2269–2302, 2013). We show that (i) the first-best can be achieved when countries either act as Perfect Kantians or by fully cooperating; (ii) in a more imperfect setting, these two forms of moral behaviour are complementary approaches to improving welfare outcomes in the sense that the greater the weights on Kantian behaviour the larger is the equilibrium coalition; (iii) the weights on Kantian behaviour that will induce full cooperation and hence the first-best are significantly less than 1; (iv) for given Kantian weights, our model generates higher equilibrium IEA membership, lower emissions and higher welfare than in the related paper by Eichner and Pethig (International environmental agreements when countries behave morally) which, we argue, does not fully capture the benefits of membership decisions.