The authors examine the performance of community organizations that provide safe drinking water in rural Costa Rica.

Using household surveys with highly disaggregated geographic reference, the authors explored how national parks affect local wages in Costa Rica and how effects on local welfare can be positive or negative in different parks or even within different areas of a park.

Trees have both economic and ecological purposes in rural Ethiopia, supplying households with wood products for consumption and sale, and decreasing soil degradation.

The authors surveyed firms participating in emissions trading programs in Santiago, Chile, to explore further whether tradable permits are appropriate for transition and developing economies. Their survey information revealed serious implementation and design flaws in Chile’s trading, but they are not more severe than the EU or U.S. systems. Countries with similar income levels and institutional maturity as Chile should be able to develop well-functioning permit trading schemes.

Although fuel taxes are a practical means of curbing vehicular air pollution, congestion, and accidents in developing countries—all of which are typically major problems—they are often opposed on distributional grounds.

Poor Kenyan farmers in rain-fed, risky environments are reluctant to adopt new technologies with potential production gain because of enormous downside risks.

In developing countries, production and consumption risks play a critical role in the choice and use of production inputs and adoption of new farm technologies. The authors investigated impacts of chemical fertilizer and soil and water conservation technologies adoption on production risks, using a moment-based approach and two years of cross-sectional data.

This study will review the past studies of the cost of land degradation in Ethiopia, assess the major methodological and conceptual issues and problems existing in the different approaches, compare the findings across these studies considering the relative merits of the different approaches, and draw implications for policies and programs, as well as for future research related to land management in Ethiopia.

Using a difference-in-difference approach, this paper assesses the effects on investment of a low-cost land registration program in Ethiopia, which covered some 20 million plots over five years. Despite policy constraints, the program increased land-related investment and yielded benefits significantly above the cost of implementation.

This is an empirical exploration of villagers’ dependence on non-timber forest products in the Morogoro region in Tanzania, the decision rules used concerning where and how much they collect, how collection changes with forest degradation, and the implications of more restrictive access from participatory forest management. Villagers’ responses to increased degradation vary by forest product; some collection tends to be displaced to other forests, less of the resources are collected, and collection times increase considerably.