Richard Damania

Trade and the Political Economy of Renewable Resource Management

A growing body of literature suggests that political factors are one of the major causes of environmental damage in developing countries endowed with a relative abundance of renewable resources. This has prompted calls for the use of trade sanctions to encourage sustainable resource management practices in these countries. This paper develops a model to assess the interaction between political lobbying, trade and the incentives to extract a renewable resource. It is demonstrated that in a political equilibrium trade sanctions may have effects that have not been previously identified in the literature. It is shown that if the government is predisposed to the demands of special interest lobby groups, then trade sanctions may fail to induce better resource management practices. There are circumstances where sanctions lead to greater harvesting of the renewable resource and worsen environmental outcomes.

Agricultural Technology Choice and Transport

This paper addresses an old and recurring theme in development economics: the slow adoption of new technologies by farmers in many developing countries. The paper explores a somewhat novel link to explain this puzzle -- the link between market access and the incentives to adopt a new technology when there are non-convexities. The paper develops a theoretical model to guide the empirical analysis, which uses spatially disaggregated agricultural production data from Spatial Production Allocation Model and Living Standards Measurement Study survey data for Nigeria. The model is used to estimate the impact of transport costs on crop production, the adoption of modern technologies, and the differential impact on returns of modern versus traditional farmers. To overcome the limitation of data availability on travel costs for much of Africa, road survey data are combined with geographic information road network data to generate the most thorough and accurate road network available. With these data and the Highway Development Management Model, minimum travel costs from each location to the market are computed. Consistent with the theory, analysis finds that transportation costs are critical in determining technology choices, with a greater responsiveness among farmers who adopt modern technologies, and at times a perverse (negative) response to lower transport costs among those who employ more traditional techniques. In sum, the paper presents compelling evidence that the constraints to the adoption of modern technologies and access to markets are interconnected, and so should be targeted jointly.

Evaluating Transport Infrastructure Projects in Low Data Environments: An Application to Nigeria

Abstract Transport infrastructure consumes a large fraction of the development assistance envelope. Yet procedures for evaluating transport infrastructure projects are typically ad-hoc. This paper proposes an approach to assess the differential impacts of alternative investment proposals in data constrained environments where conducting reliable impact analyses is difficult. We first demonstrate a technique for estimating the cost of transporting products to markets. We then estimate the impact of improving the road network on economic activity. Finally, we perform simulations to demonstrate a methodology for prioritising alternative investments. The analysis demonstrates a pragmatic, though rigorous, approach for assessing transport infrastructure benefits.

Assessing the consequences of sea-level rise in the coastal zone of Quintana Roo, México: the costs of inaction

The Mexican State of Quintana Roo, located in the Caribbean, is an area of high environmental and socio-economic value. Its low elevation and long coastline render the State physically and economically highly vulnerable to accelerated sea-level rise. The purpose of this study is to undertake an initial assessment of the potential land loss and costs that might eventuate by flooding due to sea-level rise (SLR). Given the spread of impacts caused by SLR, a variety of measures are presented to capture these diverse effects. A three pronged approach is adopted which combines areas affected by SLR with impacts identified in the population, the economy, and the environmental systems. Tourism is the primary source of income and growth in the state of Quintana Roo, consequently the economic impact of SLR is measured through the affect on different sectors of the economy which is exclusively conducted in the coastal zone, while the environmental impact is approximated by the estimated loss of mangroves, and the impact on population is proxied by means of the number of people that could be directly affected by flooding. Based on current estimates of SLR, we utilise a minimum inundation level of 1xa0m and a maximum inundation level of 5xa0m. The inundation analysis is based on results from a Geographical Information System that identifies locations and the socioeconomic sectors that are most at risk from accelerated sea-level rise. Given the uncertainty of projected future development paths, conservative but plausible assumptions are used to provide a variety of estimates of the costs of SLR. Our results show that, for the most conservative scenario to 2100, at least 27xa0% of mangroves in the State would be lost with an upper bound of 94xa0% (with an associated economic loss of

The economics of wildlife farming and endangered species conservation

405.325 million), over one million people would be flooded, and impacts on the economy would imply large losses over

On the gains of committing to inefficiency: Corruption, deforestation and low land productivity in Latin America

400 million. Less conservative, more likely scenarios depict a greater, non-linear impact. These provide first order estimates of the costs and consequences of inaction and the importance of preventive measures.