This paper uses data from a 2003 rural survey to examine the determinants of household provision of environmental services under China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), the largest payment for environmental services program in the developing world.

State-owned forest enterprises (SOFEs) in northeast China and Inner Mongolia play important roles both in timber production and in the maintenance of ecological security. However, since the late 1970s, forest resource and economic crises have seriously restricted these functions.

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.

Addressing environmental challenges. including climate change has been rationalized in China as both necessary for solving domestic problems and capable of gaining new business opportunities and competitive advantages.

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.

Whether government has the political will and capacity to control pollution is crucial for environmental outcomes. A vast country such as China, with centralized policymaking but idiosyncratic local implementation of environmental regulations and drastic regional disparities in wealth, raises the question how does the central government stimulate local environmental commitment to accommodate such diversity?

Decentralization experiments are currently underway in the Chinese forestry sector. However, researchers and policy makers tend to ignore a key question: what do forest farmers really want from reform?

This report presents EfD China, its members and work during 2010.For a free hardcopy, please send an email to: info@efdinitiative.org

The Chinese node of the Environment for Development initiative is based at:
Environmental Economics Program in China (EEPC)
Peking University
Beijing 100871, CHINA

Coordinator: Dr Jintao Xu
Email: xujt@pku.edu.cn
Tel: +86-10-62767629

This paper extends the basic model of Fausmann, and theoretically analyzes how forest tenure reform, tax reform, and market development affect timber supply.