To what extent do firms rely on rural output for demand and capital? We provide new evidence on this classic development question by examining the impact of agricultural output on local economic activity. Rainfall provides exogenous and significant variation in rural earnings. We find that such fluctuations have a lasting impact on urban firms, with effects concentrated in the manufacturing sec...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can limit investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants, grants of or opportunities to purchase r...

Groundwater depletion is becoming a serious policy concern in many developing countries but little is known about the costs of groundwater depletion. I use annual deviations of depth to groundwater from 1999 to 2003 from the 1985-1995 decadal means for Indian districts, to investigate how production and sown area respond to groundwater fluctuations. I find that a 1 meter decline in groundwater ...

We survey those recent developments in environmental and resource economics that have been prompted by a puzzling cultural phenomenon, where one group (usually natural scientists) sees in humanity's current use of Nature's services symptoms of a deep malaise, even while another group (usually economists) documents the fact that people today are on average better off in many ways than they had e...

There has been a tendency throughout Latin America, in recent decades of the expansion of activities associated with reprimarization. The latter refers to all activities of extractivism, such as mining and petroleum, as well as agricultural activities, such as cattle and soy. These are linked to the strong growth of the commodities markets and the amazing growth of China. This paper examines th...

This study overviews sustainable development goals (SDGs) and energy transition (SET) then examines − sub-Sahara Africa’s (SSA) participation in SET; challenges of power inadequacy, exploitation, deployment zero-carbon based energy; steps to fast track renewable (RE) utilisation. The identifies factors responsible for inadequacy the region include poor equipment manufacturing infrastructure, pi...

We build a workable game of common-property resource extraction under rational Bayesian learning about the renewal prospects of a resource. We uncover the impact of exogenously shifting the prior beliefs of each player on the response functions of others. What we …nd about the role of environmental conservation campaigns is paradoxical. To the extent that such campaigns instill overly high pess...

In this paper we present a survey of distributional impact analysis of environmental policies envisaged or implemented to reduce greenhouse gaz emissions. The implementation of these policies usually aim at reducing greenhouse gases directly or indirectly. However, these policies can also produce important changes in factor allocation, relative prices in specific countries as well as on world m...

We derive an expression relating the change in instantaneous utility to the growth of net (genuine) saving in an economy with multiple stocks and externalities that maximizes welfare in the utilitarian sense. This result is then shown to hold for decentralized competitive efficient economies as well, to yield an extension of the Hartwick rule: instantaneous utility is non-declining along a deve...

While the regulation of tenancy arrangements is widespread in the developing world, evidence on how such regulation influences the long-run allocation of land and labor remains limited. To provide such evidence, this paper exploits quasi-random assignment of linguistically similar areas to different South Indian states and historical variation in landownership across social groups. Roughly thir...