Philip H. Brown

Modeling the costs and benefits of dam construction from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Although the benefits of dam construction are numerous, particularly in the context of climate change and growing global demand for electricity, recent experience has shown that many dams have serious negative environmental, human, and political consequences. Despite an extensive literature documenting the benefits and costs of dams from a single disciplinary perspective, few studies have simultaneously evaluated the distribution of biophysical, socio-economic, and geopolitical implications of dams. To meet the simultaneous demands for water, energy, and environmental protection well into the future, a broader view of dams is needed. We thus propose a new tool for evaluating the relative costs and benefits of dam construction based on multi-objective planning techniques. The Integrative Dam Assessment Modeling (IDAM) tool is designed to integrate biophysical, socio-economic, and geopolitical perspectives into a single cost/benefit analysis of dam construction. Each of 27 different impacts of dam construction is evaluated both objectively (e.g., flood protection, as measured by RYI years) and subjectively (i.e., the valuation of said flood protection) by a team of decision-makers. By providing a visual representation of the various costs and benefits associated with two or more dams, the IDAM tool allows decision-makers to evaluate alternatives and to articulate priorities associated with a dam project, making the decision process about dams more informed and more transparent. For all of these reasons, we believe that the IDAM tool represents an important evolutionary step in dam evaluation.

Health‐seeking behavior and hospital choice in China's New Cooperative Medical System

Since the dissolution of the Rural Cooperative Medical System at the end of the commune period, illness has emerged as a leading cause of poverty in rural China. To address the poor state of health care, the Chinese government unveiled the New Cooperative Medical System in 2002. Because local governments have been given significant control over program design, fundamental characteristics of the program vary from one county to the next. These differences may influence the decision to seek health care as well as the choice of hospital conditional on that initial decision. In this paper, we use a nested logit model to analyze household survey data from 25 counties to analyze the determinants of such health-seeking behavior. We find that age, the share of household expenditures allocated to food consumption (a measure of relative income), and the presence of other sick people in the household negatively affect the decision to seek health care while disability has a positive influence. Further, conditional on seeking treatment, the reimbursement scheme in place in each county and the average daily expenditure associated with hospitalization strongly influence hospital choice.

Hydropower Development and Resettlement Policy on China's Nu River

Hydropower represents an important alternative form of energy in China, a country that currently uses coal to supply 78% of its electricity. However, evidence from large hydropower projects in China shows that the socio-economic and environmental costs of hydropower development are substantial. Construction on the first of the 13 planned dams on the Nu River began in the summer of 2008, and villages are already beginning to be displaced. Based on fieldwork in the area, we find that the local resettlement policies infringe upon the national regulations governing resettlement caused by major infrastructure development. This infringement includes high prices for resettlement homes, forcing villagers to leave agricultural production, a lack of programs for long-term economic development, and a lack of transparency in decision-making processes.

Cash Transfers And Poverty Reduction In Chile

The headcount ratio in Chile has declined from 40 percent to 14 percent since 1987. However, most analysis of this reduction uses national and regional poverty statistics. In contrast, we employ poverty mapping methodologies to find heterogeneity in the effectiveness of transfers across counties. To better understand this variation, we explore the roles of characteristics of the local population, structural features of the county, and geography. The greatest reductions in poverty occur in rural households, yet population characteristics and geography are also important. These findings suggest that targeting at low levels of aggregation can deliver further reductions in poverty.

Distribución Espacial de la Pobreza en Chile

Chile ha sido particularmente exitoso en la reduccion de la pobreza durante los ultimos 20 anos, disminuyendo el porcentaje de la poblacion bajo la linea de pobreza de un 38,6% en 1990 a un 13,7% en 2006. Con tasas de pobreza mas bajas, el esfuerzo de focalizacion necesario para el diseno de politicas publicas que permitan reducir aun mas o erradicar la pobreza, es mucho mayor y se requiere informacion mas desagregada a nivel geografico. Los mapas de pobreza pueden cumplir este rol, ya que entregan una descripcion detallada de la distribucion espacial de la pobreza, lo cual permite adicionalmente estudiar las relaciones entre la pobreza, urbana y rural, y algunas variables socioeconomicas o comportamientos sociales. Sin embargo, estos estudios se ven limitados por la falta de datos suficientemente detallados y desagregados respecto a la pobreza a nivel local. Especificamente, los datos disponibles en las encuestas de ingreso no son representativos a niveles geograficos muy desagregados y, los censos, no tienen informacion sobre ingresos. En los ultimos anos ha habido avances importantes en el desarrollo de metodologias que permitan combinar datos de encuestas y de censos para obtener estimadores de pobreza robustos a niveles geograficos mas desagregados. En este trabajo, se utiliza este tipo de metodologias para producir estimadores consistentes de pobreza, tanto rural como urbana, a nivel comunal para Chile. Esto abre la posibilidad de investigar en el futuro los determinantes de la pobreza en Chile y el rol que juega la pobreza local, ya que los resultados obtenidos muestran la existencia de un grado importante de variacion en la pobreza entre comunas y entre la pobreza comunal urbana y rural.

Poverty and Inequality Among Ethnic Groups in Chile

Despite two decades of rapid growth, indigenous Chileans are disproportionately poor. However, income data obtained from non-representative surveys yield imprecise estimates of poverty and inequality. This paper therefore estimates poverty and inequality using poverty mapping methods. In contrast to previous studies, however, we use ethnicity rather than geography as a basis for disaggregation. We find that indigenous Chileans are significantly poorer than non-indigenous people, but that inequality rates are also lower for indigenous groups. These reliable estimates of poverty and inequality may augment the antipoverty targeting criteria used in Chile, helping policy-makers to better identify poor households.

Local Distributional Effects Of Government Cash Transfers In Chile

Despite rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, inequality in Chile has remained high and remarkably constant over the last 20 years, prompting academic and public interest in the subject. Due to data limitations, however, research on inequality in Chile has concentrated on the national and regional levels. The impact of cash subsidies to poor households on local inequality is thus not well understood. Using poverty-mapping methods to asses this impact, we find heterogeneity in the effectiveness of regional and municipal governments in reducing inequality via poverty-reduction transfers, suggesting that alternative targeting regimes may complement current practice in aiding the poor.

Media Coverage & Charitable Giving After the 2004 Tsunami

Media coverage of humanitarian crises is widely believed to influence charitable giving, yet this assertion has received little empirical scrutiny. Using Internet donations after the 2004 tsunami as a case study, we show that media coverage of disasters has a dramatic impact on donations to relief agencies, with an additional minute of nightly news coverage increasing donations by 0.036 standard deviations from the mean, or 13.2% of the average daily donation for the typical relief agency. Similarly, an additional 700-word story in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal raises donations by 18.2% of the daily average. These results are robust to controls for the timing of news coverage and tax considerations. We repeat the analysis using instrumental variables to account for endogeneity bias, and the estimates are unchanged. However, we also find that the effect of news coverage varies considerably by relief agency.

Spatial Inequality in Chile

Despite success in reducing poverty over the last twenty years, inequality in Chile has remained virtually unchanged, making Chile one of the least equal countries in the world. High levels of inequality have been shown to hamper further reductions in poverty as well as economic growth and local inequality has been shown to affect Duch outcomes as violence and health. The study of inequality at the local level is thus crucial for understanding the economic well-being of a country. Local measures of inequality have been difficult to obtain, but recent theoretical advances have enabled the combination of survey and census data to obtain estimators of inequality that are robust at disaggregated geographic levels. In this paper, we employ this methodology to produce consistent estimators of inequality for every county in Chile. We find a great deal of variation in inequality, with county-level Gini coefficients ranging from 0.41 to 0.63.

Estimando Indigencia y Pobreza Indígena Regional con Datos Censales y Encuestas de Hogares

While indigenous Chileans are believed to experience higher poverty rates than non-indigenous Chileans, evidence is typically based on surveys that are not representative by ethnicity. We adapt poverty mapping methodologies to estimate poverty and poverty