A concern of many environmentalists is that the use of biomass energy will decimate the forests. Searchinger et al. (2008, 2009) examined this issue related to corn ethanol and suggested that substituting corn ethanol for petroleum would increase carbon emissions associated with the land...

Concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere influences the climate, which then alters the amount of primary energy for countries or regions where hydropower and wind power constitute important parts of the energy supply. Besides, the demand effect of temperature increases may be large in...

We examine the effect of the introduction of uniform water-charging for aquifer management and provide evidence using a survey-based choice experiment of agricultural water users in rural Tunisia. Theoretically, we show that the implementation of the proposed second-best regulation would result...

We use three rounds of a rich panel data set to investigate the determinants of household fuel choice and energy transition in urban Ethiopia. We observe that energy transition did not occur following economic growth in Ethiopia during the past decade. Regression results from a random effects...

Households in rural India are highly dependent on firewood as their main source of energy, partly because non-biofuels tend to be expensive. The prevailing view is therefore that, when faced with shortages of firewood in the village commons, such households, and especially the women in them,...

While several studies have shown that genetically modified Bt cotton can benefit smallholder farmers economically, the sustainability of these effects is still unclear and debated controversially between biotechnology proponents and critics. We use unique panel data of 533 cotton farmers,...

In this paper, a model of the nitrogen cycle in the soil is incorporated in a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of the Tanzanian economy, thus establishing a two way link between the environment and the economy. For a given level of natural soil productivity, profit maximising farmers...

In Eastern Africa, the experience of Machakos has been heavily debated between Malthusians and the more optimistic Boserupians. Machakos was the epitome of overpopulation and resource degradation in the 1950s, but has since thrived. The Boserupians view Machakos as an illustration of how...

In countries where insurance and credit markets are thin or missing, production and consumption risks play a critical role in the choice and use of production inputs and adoption of new farm technologies. In this paper, we investigated impacts of chemical fertilizer and soil and water...

This study adopts the stochastic metafrontier approach to investigate the role of soil conservation in small-scale highland agriculture in Ethiopia. Plot-level stochastic frontiers and metafrontier technology-gap ratios were estimated for three soil-conservation technology groups and a group of...