This is the three-year activity report for the agreement
between Sida and the Environmental Economics Unit for
the period 2007 – 2009 in support of programs pertaining
to environmental economics activities.

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.

Unique survey data from a contingent valuation study conducted in three different countries (China, Sweden, and the United States) were used to investigate the ordinary citizen’s willingness to pay (WTP) for reducing CO2 emissions. We found that a large majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over the last 100 years and that humans are responsible for the increase.

Currently, there is a general dichotomy in rural development policies. This dichotomy between extension-driven adoption of modern inputs on the one hand, and community-driven local public goods on the other hand, is particularly evident in the highlands of Ethiopia. Despite the obvious trade-offs between these two approaches, the target populations seldom get the chance to express their preferences for them.

National parks attract tourists to developing countries. However, there are only rare cases where the full economic rent from tourism in protected areas has been captured by these countries. This severely limits the capacity of developing countries to sustain these protected areas. The present study investigates the efficiency of the current pricing policies of Kakum National Park in Ghana.

The Environment for Development initiative started in 2007 and this is the report for the first three-year period.

EfD is an initiative to support environmental economics capacity to conduct research, academic training and policy outreach.

The six EfD centers are expected to make a difference by contributing to better environmental management and thereby reducing poverty in developing countries.

This paper examines the concern for relative standing among rural households in China. We used a survey-experimental method to measure to what extent poor Chinese farmers care about their relative income and found that the respondents cared to a high degree

The authors looked at risk and ambiguity attitudes among Ethiopian peasants in one of the poorest regions of the world and compared their attitudes to a standard Western university student sample elicited by the same decision task.

Strong risk aversion and ambiguity aversion were found with the Ethiopian peasants, and these attitudes are similar to those of the university students. Testing for the effect of socioeconomic variables on uncertainty attitudes showed that poor health increased both risk and ambiguity aversion.

Improving soil carbon through conservation agriculture in developing countries may generate some private benefits to farmers, as well as sequester carbon emissions, which is a positive externality to society. Leaving crop residue on the farm has become an important option in conservation agriculture practice. However, in developing countries, using crop residue for conservation agriculture has the opportunity cost of feed for livestock.