Fuel Taxes and the Poor challenges the conventional wisdom that gasoline taxation, an important and much-debated instrument of climate policy, has a disproportionately detrimental effect on poor people.

Fuel Taxes and the Poor, The Distributional Effects of Gasoline Taxation and Their Implications for Climate Policy. Edited By Thomas Sterner. Published by RFF Press with Environment for Development initiative.

In this paper we use laboratory experiments to test the theoretical predictions derived by Villegas-Palacio and Coria (2010) about the effects of the interaction between technology adoption and incomplete enforcement. They show that under Tradable Emissions Permits (TEPs), and in contrast to taxes, the fall in permit price produced by adoption of environmentally friendly technologies reduces the benefits of violating the environmental regulation at the margin and leads firms to improve their compliance behavior.

Using a choice experiment, we investigated preferences for distributing the economic burden of decreasing CO2 emissions in the two largest CO2-emitting countries: the United States and China. We asked respondents about their preferences for four burden-sharing rules to reduce CO2 emissions according to their country’’s 1) historical emissions, 2) income level, 3) equal right to emit per person, and 4) current emissions.

This paper analyses the economic impacts of climate change on Ethiopia’s agriculture using a countrywide computable general equilibrium model.

The objective of the report is to review the literature on the links between energy access, welfare, and gender in order to provide evidence on where gender considerations in the energy sector matter and how they might be addressed.

This is the activity report for the agreement between Sida and the Environmental Economics Unit for 2010. It is an extension of the agreement for the period 2007 – 2009 in support of programs pertaining to environmental economics activities (Sida ref: 2006-002684, Komponent:73000988). The overall development objective for the program is to improve welfare among poor people in developing countries by preventing pollution and natural resource depletion, and to promote sustainable use of natural resources and ecosystems through the use of environmental economics tools.

We investigate attitudes toward positionality among rural farmers in Northern Ethiopia using a survey experiment.

On average, we find very low positional concerns both for income per se and for income from aid projects. The results support the claim that positional concerns are positively correlated with absolute level of income. The implications of our results on implementation of aid projects are discussed.

We investigate risk and ambiguity attitudes among Ethiopian farmers in one of the poorest regions of the world.