Keisuke Kawata

Do Forest Permits Cause Deforestation in Indonesia

SUMMARY Deforestation is the most critical issue of climate change in Indonesia, as well as in other tropical countries, meanwhile major forests is managed under concession or permit system. This paper investigates the effect of forest permits on deforestation in Indonesia. Two major forest permits are taken into analysis, resulting that logging permit is insignificantly correlated to forest cover loss, whereas plantation conversion permit diminishes more forest cover in Indonesia. These results pose a question on the effectiveness of the current forest moratorium policy as well as the forest tariff policy to the attempts in mitigating deforestation. At the end, this paper summarises possible alternative forest policies derived from the empirical findings, from both short and long term perspectives.

Does the Institutional Failure Undermine the Physical Design Performances of the Solar Water Pumping Systems in Rural Nepal

The mountainous hinterland in rural Nepal lacks a fundamental social infrastructure. For example, the lack of electricity causes water provision difficulties, especially in mountainous areas where villagers, especially women and children, often spend a considerable amount of time just conveying water to their homes. To overcome this challenge, a subsidy policy for the installation of a solar-photovoltaic water pumping system (SWPS) has recently been implemented nationwide in Nepal. The Nepali governments tight financial constraints require that the installation process is both economically and technologically sound. However, the institutional design of the current subsidization policy is price-distortionary and potentially induces the installation of inefficient systems. By collecting original field data from 38 wards in all seven regions of Nepal, this paper measures the SWPSs technical efficiencies and then identifies relevant economic policies that will enhance the performance of the SWPS. Our results show, inter alia, that a higher dependency on financial support from the government is associated with excessive investment in the SWPS.

Analyzing the impact of labor market integration

We develop a competitive search model involving multiple regions, geographically mobile work- ers, and moving costs. Equilibrium mobility patterns are analyzed and characterized, indicating that shocks to a particular region, such as a productivity shock, can propagate to other regions through workers f mobility. Moreover, equilibrium mobility patterns are not efficient due to the existence of moving costs, implying that they affect social welfare not only because they are costs but also be- cause they distort equilibrium allocation. By calibrating our framework to Japanese regional data, we demonstrate that the impacts of eliminating migration costs are comparable to those of a 30% productivity increase.

Offshoring, trade and environmental policies : Effects of transboundary pollution

This study develops a two-country model, Home and Foreign, with offshoring and environmental spillover. A final good producer in Home can produce (homogeneous) final goods using customized inputs produced by its partner-supplier in Foreign. The intermediate input price is determined by Nash bargaining, presenting a hold-up problem. Additionally, input production causes transboundary pollution. Home and Foreign governments can set trade taxes. Moreover, the Foreign government can set the environmental standard. This model demonstrates that, under no international policy agreement, both the environmental standard and the quantity of the intermediate input are lower than the first-best levels. This inefficiency persists even if both governments conclude an agreement.

Work Hour Mismatch and On-the-job Search

This paper explores an on-the-job search model with wage bargaining and mismatch. It considers two types of jobs and workers, and the instantaneous value of the job-worker match depends on their type. The most important assumption is that while the job type is fixed throughout its life, the worker type changes in accordance with a stochastic process. This paper shows that although the workers turnover decision is privately efficient, this decision may be socially inefficient because of the hold-up problem.

Efficiency of skill training for acquiring sector-specific skills with search frictions

This paper develops a simple search model in which sector-specific trainings are endogenously determined with or without a negotiation between a worker and an employer, and characterizes the allocation of two types of training. If a worker and an employer can negotiate over the amount of skill training, the training hours to acquire a skill specific to this employers sector may be longer or shorter in the decentralized allocation than in the socially efficient allocation. Meanwhile, if they cannot negotiate, the training hours are definitely longer in the decentralized allocation than in the socially efficient allocation.