A three-stage game including investments, environmental quality provision and price competition is developed to study the impact of green technology investment (ecolabeling), in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation. The firms' incentives to invest in green technologies depend on their relative cost structure. When firms are identical with respect to fixed costs, both firms will always invest, but if one firm is more efficient in investing, then the other firm may or may not invest depending on the level of unit cost of investment. Quality competition will be tighter when the low quality firm is more efficient, and looser when the high quality firm is more efficient in investing. Socially optimal investment for both firms is always positive, but lower than in the duopoly solution. In the absence of environmental externalities, the quality dispersion chosen by profit maximizing firms may be too high or too low, while environmental externalities increase the possibility of too low quality dispersion in the market solution. Finally, and importantly, ecolabeling can be used as a means of reducing excessive investment and increasing too low environmental quality.

Our purpose is to estimate a model of non-industrial forest landowner behavior that considers certain types of behavior that have escaped discussion and rigorous investigation in the literature, yet which are critical to future policy making. Our focus on the many different but related decisions landowners make broadens the typical understanding of landowner behavior to show how bequest motives, debt and participation in non-timber activities, and harvesting decisions are interrelated and dependent on landowner preferences, market, and land characteristics.

No abstract

No abstract

The adoption of more efficient farming practices and technologies that enhance agricultural productivity and improve environmental sustainability is instrumental for achieving economic growth, food security, and poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa. Our research examines the interaction between public investments, community health, and adoption of productivity and land enhancing technologies by households in the northern Ethiopian state of Tigray. Agricultural technology adoption decisions are modeled as a sequential process where the timing of choices can matter. We find that time spent sick and opportunity costs of caring for sick family members are significant factors in adoption. Sickness, through its impact on household income and labor allocation decisions for healthcare and other activities, significantly reduces the likelihood of technology adoption. Our findings suggest that agencies working to improve agricultural productivity and land resource conservation should consider not only the financial status of potential adopters, but also their related health situation. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Logging has been a much maligned feature of frontier development in the Amazon. Most discussions ignore the fact that logging can be part of a renewable, environmentally benign, and broadly equitable economic activity in these remote places. We estimate there to be some 4.5 +/- 1.35 billion m(3) of commercial timber volume in the Brazilian Amazon today, of which 1.2 billion m(3) is currently profitable to harvest, with a total potential stumpage value of $15.4 billion. A successful forest sector in the Brazilian Amazon will integrate timber harvesting on private lands and on unprotected and unsettled government lands with timber concessions on public lands. If a legal, productive, timber industry can be established outside of protected areas, it will deliver environmental benefits in synergy with those provided by the region's network of protected areas, the latter of which we estimate to have an opportunity cost from lost timber revenues of $2.3 billion over 30 years. Indeed, on all land accessible to harvesting, the timber industry could produce an average of more than 16 million m(3) per year over a 30-year harvest cycle-entirely outside of current protected areas-providing $4.8 billion in returns to landowners and generating $1.8 billion in sawnwood sales tax revenue. This level of harvest could be profitably complemented with an additional 10% from logging concessions on National Forests. This advance, however, should be realized only through widespread adoption of reduced impact logging techniques.

The topic of deforestation is seldom examined from the perspective of prices and responses to resource scarcity. This omission creates important errors in policy. Resource scarcity induces investments in both commercial and subsistence uses of the forest once prices overcome the costs of establishing property rights, forest management, and the returns from alternative agricultural uses of the land. Therefore deforestation will induce price increases and investments in forestry well before deforestation attains its physical limit. These prices and costs will alter the boundaries among several important classes of forest land: sustainable private forestry, the forested commons, unsustainable open-access forests, and unused residual forest. The greatest impact on the world's forests will come from refocusing the policy dialogue on the cost factors that determine these boundaries, including agricultural support policies, local concentrations of nonmarket environmental resources, and policy failures that distort incentives to invest in forestry. In locations where reforestation induces large price changes, policymakers must remain attuned to the likelihood that deforestation-induced changes in the prices of forest products and forest policies may cause significant shifts in the activities of the poorest people. C onserving scarce forest resources is a challenge for both high-and lowincome countries. Contemporary forest policy and forest management both reflect this challenge. Forest policy reflects international concern with the pressures of deforestation, including trade in tropical timber, the con : version of forests to agricultural uses, and the effects of deforestation on climate change, biodiversity, and local communities dependent on forest resources. Forest management features the transition to managed forests as deforestation causes

No abstract