Brazil has presided over the most comprehensive agrarian reform frontier colonization program on Earth, in which ~1.2 million settlers have been translocated by successive governments since the 1970's, mostly into forested hinterlands of Brazilian Amazonia. These settlements encompass 5.3% of this ~5 million km2 region, but have contributed with 13.5% of all land conversion into agropastoral la...

Concern about the environmental impacts of transgenic crops is one of the major reasons for the EU’s quasi moratorium on GMOs (European Environment Council 1999). The contributions in this book show that the economic implications of these concerns are far-reaching and complex. At the centre of the theoretical framework for analysis stands the linear chain of agricultural biotechnology developme...

Food systems--in particular, livestock production--are key drivers of environmental change. Here, we compare the contributions of the global livestock sector in 2000 with estimated contributions of this sector in 2050 to three important environmental concerns: climate change, reactive nitrogen mobilization, and appropriation of plant biomass at planetary scales. Because environmental sustainabi...

A recent study has found that butterflies maintain behavioural plasticity useful to them in rare environments by reducing associated costs in common environments. Butterflies use innate sensory biases to locate common green hosts, but learn to modify these preferences to find rare, red host-plants.

The typical cost analysis of an environmental regulation consists of an engineering estimate of the compliance costs. In industries where fixed costs are an important determinant of market structure this static analysis ignores the dynamic effects of the regulation on entry, investment, and market power. I evaluate the welfare costs of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act on the US Portland...

This manuscript examines the relationship between political veto points, credible commitments and regulatory compliance costs. We extend the work on credible commitments in comparative political economy and apply this framework to environmental compliance costs in the American states. Our central purpose is to assess whether different types of political veto points credibly constrain regulatory...