This paper investigates the opportunities for reducing the pressure of urban centers on rural forest areas, using a dataset of 350 urban households in Tigrai in northern Ethiopia.

We applied an almost‐ideal demand system to fuels. The results suggest that reducing the pressure of urban centers on local forests cannot be seen in isolation from broader development policies aimed at raising the level of education and income of the population. Higher income also stimulates the demand for fuel.

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.

We examine the control of air pollution caused by households burning wood for heating and cooking in the developing world. Since the problem is one of controlling emissions from nonpoint sources, regulations are likely to be directed at household choices of wood consumption and combustion technologies. Moreover, these choices are subtractions from, or contributions to, the pure public good of air quality. Consequently, the efficient policy design is not independent of the distribution of household income.

We estimate the implicit prices of the crime rate and airborne pollution in Chile, using spatially compensating price differentials in the housing and labor markets. We evaluate empirically the impact of different estimation strategies for the wage and rent equations, on the economic value of these two amenities. The results show that increments in the crime rate or in air pollution have a negative impact on welfare and that the estimated welfare measures and their variances are sensitive to selection bias, endogenous amenities and clustering effects.

We use household survey data and income-outcome coefficients to analyze fuel tax incidence in Costa Rica. We find that the effect of a 10 percent fuel price hike through direct spending on gasoline would be progressive, its effect through spending on diesel—both directly and via bus transportation—would be regressive (mainly because poorer households rely heavily on buses), and its effect through spending on goods other than fuel and bus transportation would be relatively small, albeit regressive.

Urbanization has been mentioned as one possible cause of higher food prices, and in this paper we examine some of the suggested links between urbanization and food prices.

In this paper, we study the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia in order to see how it has affected households’ investment and disinvestment in productive assets. The PSNP is the largest currently operating social protection program in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa, and its impacts and effectiveness are therefore important both in their own right and because they have implications for similar but smaller programs elsewhere.

This paper examines the multiple fuel choices of urban households in major Ethiopian cities, using panel data collected in 2000 and 2004. The results suggest that as urban and rural households’ total expenditures rise, they use more types of fuels (including wood) and spend more on the fuels consumed. The results also support arguments that multiple fuel use better describes the fuel-choices of households in developing countries, as opposed to the idea that households switch to more expensive but cleaner fuels as incomes rise.

In the highlands of Ethiopia, livestock as an important component of the mixed farming system perform multiple functions providing high quality food, draft power and manure for crop production, and cash income. Field studies in different parts of the country in the 1980s showed that livestock account for 37-87% of total farm cash income of farmers, indicating the importance of livestock in rural livelihood, especially as one moves from mixed farming in the highlands to agropastoral systems on the highland-lowland margins (Gryseels, 1988).

The choice of domestic fuel is a matter of great concern for households and policy makers in India. This paper investigates the demand for domestic fuels when households face four choices: Fuelwood, Coal, Kerosene and LPG.