Does Tourism Eco-Certification Pay? Costa Rica’s Blue Flag Program

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

According to advocates, eco-certification can stem environmental damages from tourism in developing countries. Yet we know little about tourism operators’ economic incentives to get certified. To help fill that gap, we use detailed panel data to analyze the Blue Flag beach certification program in Costa Rica where nature-based tourism has caused significant environmental damage. We use new hotel investment to proxy for private benefits, and fixed effects and propensity score matching to control for self-selection bias.

Conservation

Voluntary environmental agreements in developing countries: the Colombian experience

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated between environmental regulators and polluters are increasingly popular in developing countries. According to proponents, they can sidestep weak institutions and other pervasive barriers to conventional mandatory regulation in such countries. Yet little is known about the drivers of their use and their effectiveness in poor countries. The considerable literature on voluntary initiatives in industrialized countries, where both VAs and socioeconomic conditions differ, may not apply.

Policy Design

Promoting Second Generation Biofuels Does the First Generation Pave the Road?

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The transport sector contributes almost a fifth of the current global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), and its share is likely to increase in the future. The US, Brazil, and a number of European and other countries worldwide have introduced various support schemes for biofuels.

Energy

Extraction of natural resources in contexts of abundance and scarcity: An experimental analysis on non-compliance with quotas in management and exploitation areas of benthic resources in central-southern Chile

Submitted by NENRE Concepcion on

We study through framed field economic experiment the effects of exogenous changes in abundance levels of a renewable natural resource on compliance individual decisions of users operating under a common property regime and a system of Territorial use rights in fisheries (TURF) considering extraction quotas and external enforcement to detect and sanctions violations.

Fisheries

Evaluating forest conservation policies in developing countries using remote sensing data: An introduction and practical guide

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on
EfD Authors:

Rigorous, objective evaluation of forest conservation policies in developing countries is needed to ensure that the limited financial, human, and political resources devoted to these policies are put to good use. Yet such evaluations remain uncommon. Recent advances in conservation best practices, the widening availability of high-resolution remotely sensed forest-cover data, and the dissemination of geographic information system capacity have created significant opportunities to reverse this trend.

Forestry, Policy Design

Prices vs Quantities with Multiple Pollutants

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

We examine the choice of policy instruments (price, quantity or a mix of the two) when two pollutants are regulated and firms’ abatement costs are private information.

Whether abatement efforts are complements or substitutes is key determining the choice of policies. When pollutants are complements, a mixed policy instrument with a tax on one pollutant and a quota on another is sometimes preferable even if the pollutants are identical in terms of benefits and costs of abatement. Yet, if they are substitutes, the mixed policy is dominated by taxes or quotas.

Climate Change, Policy Design

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—A multiple country test of an oath script

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Hypothetical bias is one of the main issues bedeviling the field of nonmarket valuation. The general criticism is that survey responses reflect how people would like to behave, rather than how they actually behave. In our study of climate change and carbon emissions reductions, based on the increasing bulk of evidence from psychology and economics regarding the effects of making promises, we investigate the effect of an oath script in a contingent valuation survey.

Climate Change

Does Tourism Eco-Certification Pay? Costa Rica's Blue Flag Program

Submitted by admin on

Eco-certification can generate private benefits for tourism operators in developing countries and therefore has the potential to improve their environmental performance.

Forestry, Policy Design

Electricity provision with intermittent sources of energy

Submitted by admin on

We analyze the interaction between a reliable source of electricity production and intermittentsources such as wind or solar power. We first characterize the optimal energy mix, emphasizing the availability of the intermittentsource as a major parameter for the optimal investment in capacity.

Climate Change, Policy Design

Does Tourism Eco-Certification Pay? Costa Rica’s Blue Flag Program

Submitted by admin on

Our findings provide some of the first evidence that eco-certification can generate private benefits for tourism operators in developing countries and therefore has the potential to improve their environmental performance.

Policy Design