Policy makers in developing countries need to balance an array of distributional, political, fiscal and environmental goals in deciding whether to raise fuel taxes. Our analysis demonstrates that distributional concerns need not trump competing goals.

For Costa Rica’s parks and reserves, a threatened location is the key to effectively avoiding deforestation

EfD-CA's research fellows are estimating a cost base structure for the allocation of service concessions and non-essential activities within the protected wilderness areas.

The authors used a framed field experiment with coffee farmers in Costa Rica after tropical storm Alma to explore how farmers react to different levels of risk to income and productive means from extreme weather under measurable and unmeasurable uncertainty. They also examined whether investment costs to reduce vulnerability exhibit economies of scope.

There is growing interest in understanding whether behavior is the same across locations. By holding cross- and within-country dimensions constant (in contrast to previous studies on cross-group comparisons of conditional cooperation), the authors investigated cooperative behavior between social groups in the same location. Their results reveal significantly different cooperation behavior, suggesting that different social groups exhibit differences both in terms of composition of types and extent of conditional cooperation.

In developing countries, weak environmental regulatory institutions often undermine conventional command-and-control policies. As a result, these countries are increasingly experimenting with alternative approaches that aim to leverage nonregulatory “green” pressures applied by local communities, capital markets, and consumers. This article reviews three strands of the empirical literature on this trend.