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Abstract: Health and environment have recently been active research areas in development economics. However, estimating impacts on development has been hampered by concerns that there may be confounding variables that bias the estimates. My dissertation evaluates a credible relationship between the two by identifying an empirical context in which the roles of confounding variables are mitigated. The first essay quantifies the impacts of air pollution and related regulations on infant mortality in China. I exploit plausibly exogenous variations in air quality generated by environmental regulations since 1995. The results suggest that the regulations led to significant reductions in air pollution and infant mortality rate (IMR). I estimate that 25,400 fewer infants died per year than would have died in the absence of the regulations, corresponding to about a 21 percent decline in IMR. The instrumental variable estimates indicate that a one percent reduction in total suspended particulates results in a 0.95 percent reduction in IMR, whereas a one percent reduction in sulfur dioxide results in a 0.82 percent reduction in IMR. The estimated impact of a unit change in TSP is of similar magnitude to that found in the U.S., but the elasticity is substantially higher in China, highlighting the greater benefits associated with regulations when pollution is already quite high. The second essay quantifies the returns of health infrastructure to child health status, as measured by weight-for-age z-scores. By exploiting plausibly exogenous changes in access to health services induced by the health policy in South Africa after the end of apartheid, I show that gaining access to health institutions improves nutritional status of boys but not of girls among newly born babies and children with low health status. The third essay investigates whether improved access to health services leads to better educational achievements. The health policy I examine in the second chapter provides a rare opportunity to credibly evaluate a relationship. The results indicate that access to health services has little impact on educational outcomes, except that boys who gained substantial increases in health access at the time of enrollment are likely to start school earlier.
This thesis comprises four empirical essays on environmental and development economics. In the first chapter, we examine to what extent individual and contextual level factors influence individuals to contribute financially to prevent environmental pollution. We find that rich people, individuals with higher education, as well as those who possess post-materialist values are more likely to be concerned about environmental pollution. We also observe the country in which individuals live matter in their willingness to contribute. More precisely, we find democracy and government stability reduce individuals' intention to donate to prevent environmental damage mainly in developed countries. The second chapter deals with the relation between economic growth and environmental degradation by focusing on the issue of whether the inverted U-shaped relation exist. The study discloses no evidence for the U-shaped relation. However, the empirical result points toward a non-linear relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth, that is, emissions tend to rise rapidly in the early stages with economic growth, and then emissions continue to increase but a lower rate in the later stages. The third chapter investigates the long-run as well as the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in a group of Sub-Saharan Africa. The result discovers the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between clean energy consumption and economic growth. Furthermore, the short-run and the long-run dynamics indicate unidirectional Granger causality running from clean energy consumption to economic growth without any feedback effects. The last chapter of this thesis concerns with convergence of emissions across Canadian provinces. The study determines convergence clubs better characterizes Canadian's emissions. In other words, we detect the existence of segmentation in emissions across Canadian provinces.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the vulnerabilities of socio-economic systems globally and exposed the risks that natural capital degradation imposes on human health, economy, and society. This book studies the environmental challenges faced by developing economies in a post-COVID-19 world. Exploring diverse case studies from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the volume discusses the impact that economic development and, recently, COVID-19 has had on the environment, ecology, and economy of these regions. It analyses nature conservation policies aimed at minimizing ecological damage arising from economic development and discusses the policy objectives of sustainable development. It also highlights the significant role that environmental economics networks have played in capacity building, framing of policies using ecological economics tools, and developing a local leadership trained in addressing local sustainability issues. An important contribution to the study of environmental economics of the Global South, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of economics, environment, development studies, development economics, environmental policies, and South Asia studies. It will also be useful for policymakers and NGOs working in this field.
This book honours Partha Dasgupta, and the field he helped establish; environment and development economics. It concerns the relationship between social systems (to include families, local communities, national economies, and the world as a whole) and natural systems (critical ecosystems, forests, water resources, mineral deposits, pollution, fisheries, and the Earth's climate). Above all, it concerns the poverty-environment nexus: the complex pathways by which people become or remain poor, and resources become or remain overexploited. With contributions by some of the world's leading economists, including five recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in addition to scholars based in developing countries, this volume offers a unique perspective on the environmental issues that matter most to developing countries.
This thesis consists of three independent essays on the fields of development economics and environmental economics. The first two papers use the same theoretical model to explain different issues in developing countries. The third paper studies the effects of population growth on the Environmental Kuznets Curve provided it exists. China's internal migration plays an important role in explaining its recent economic success. The first paper constructs a model of labor migration, focusing on the role of selection effects in determining labor market outcomes, and then calibrates it to quantify the effects of China's labor market reforms on its outputs and inequality. I show that the removal of internal migration restrictions benefits the economy as a whole, while exacerbating inequality within both rural and urban areas. The second paper suggests that minimum wage policy may be beneficial for a transitional economy in which labor is migrating from rural areas to urban areas when positive moving costs occur. With a moving cost wedge a modestly binding minimum wage can cause relatively low productivity urban workers to be replaced by higher productivity rural migrants, and therefore increase aggregate output. To achieve the second best outcome, government shall fully compensate the moving costs for the marginal migrant workers who move from the rural industrial sector to the urban subsistence sector and a binding minimum wage shall be imposed on the urban workers but not the migrant workers in the urban industrial sector. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis postulates an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and many local environmental health indicators. By using an overlapping generations (OLG) model, I focus on technological effects, where the properties of the existing pollution abatement technologies could generate the inverted U-shaped EKC and other forms of growth-pollution paths for the less advanced economies. Moreover, I examine the effects of population growth on the shape of the EKC, provided that it exists. Simulations indicate positive population growth raises the height of the EKC at every level of output per worker; thus, putting an extra burden on environment quality. Empirical evidence from China partially supports the results.
Two and a half billion people are affected directly on a day to day basis by the allocation and use of primary local resources. Yet `official' development economics has concentrated on headline international issues and only recently begun to take account of the dependence of poor countries on their natural resources, the link between acute poverty and environmental degradation, and the problems associated with the management of local common property such as soil and soil cover, water, forests and their products, animals and fisheries. In these volumes, which are part of the WIDER programme on the Economics for the Environment, expert contributors provide a set of authoritative studies of emerging development issues, ranging from foundational matters to case studies, original research (in areas where there has been a paucity of work) to survey papers. They address both analytic and empirical issues on the role of environmental resources in the development process, presenting explanations of existing situations and policies for the future. A wealth of interests and backgrounds is represented, and reflected in the cross-fertilization between papers.
This dissertation lies at the intersection of environmental economics and development economics. It includes three essays that empirically examine the effects of climate change and extreme weather events on agriculture in both developed and developing countries.The first essay explores how the choice of weather data sets could affect estimates of climate change impacts. A large body of empirical literature finds that high temperatures are detrimental to a wide range of economic outcomes. These effects are often identified from the within-location temporal variation in exposure to the extreme right tail of the temperature distribution. Here, we document large discrepancies in exposure to extreme temperatures across six high-resolution gridded weather data sets in the US, where weather data is considered to be of high quality. We explore and illustrate the consequences of these data discrepancies in the estimation of potential climate change impacts on agriculture. We find that most climate change impacts based on different climate data sets are not statistically different from each other. Yet, the choice of the underlying weather data set can account for up to 48 percent of estimated warming damages on US crop yields. These findings highlight an important, but generally unrecognized, source of uncertainty in estimates of climate change impacts and the need for more systematic intercomparisons of widely used geospatial data sets in environmental social sciences.In the second essay, we estimate the impact of self-reported occurrences of droughts and floods on crop and livestock net income in Sub-Saharan Africa during the period 2009-2016. Based on a pooled data set for five countries, we find robust negative and heterogeneous impacts of droughts and floods across different levels of irrigation, poverty, and agricultural diversification, including reductions of net crop income by 34 percent and 61 percent due to droughts and floods, respectively. The study also confirms the importance of poverty alleviation and agricultural diversification to cope with the adverse effects of droughts and floods.The third essay studies the effects of droughts and floods on agricultural livelihoods in Zambia. The adverse effects of weather extremes produce widespread damage and cause severe alterations in the normal functioning of household agricultural production in Zambia. The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, are expected to increase due to climate change. Coupled with high poverty levels and limited institutional capacity, the country is highly vulnerable to the impact of extreme events. We quantify the effects of economic diversification on the agricultural productivity of poor farm households with a skew-normal regression approach while accounting for drought and flood shocks. Our analysis finds that economic diversification is a strategy to increase agricultural productivity and mitigate the adverse impact of droughts and floods on agricultural households. The results also support the country's policies to encourage hybrid maize production and to provide crop seeds and fertilizers to poor farmers. This paper provides a framework to plan and inform interventions to enhance household economic resilience to weather shocks through agricultural diversification in Zambia and other countries.