Most sub-Sahara African agriculture is rainfed and the key production risk is crop failure due to drought or insufficient rains. Major strategies for households to protect against the risk of crop failure are livestock rearing and storage of home produced food. Next to drought, SSA agriculture...

Energy and agricultural commodities and markets have been examined extensively, albeit separately, for a number of years. In the energy literature, the returns, volatility and volatility spillovers (namely, the delayed effect of a returns shock in one asset on the subsequent volatility or...

Recent research shows that efforts to limit climate change should focus on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide over other greenhouse gases or air pollutants. Many countries are paying substantial attention to carbon emissions to improve air quality and public health. The largest source of...

Pesticide use in agriculture poses several risks to both human health and non-target agro-ecosystems. Due to lack of information on the monetary value of reducing pesticide risks, it is difficult to perform an economic analysis that addresses social efficiency of policy and draws conclusions...

In the search for effective pesticide risk management tools, the design of pesticide risk indicators is nowadays receiving increasing attention as a complement to more established regulatory strategies. In the present paper, we apply some recently developed pesticide risk indices and test their...

This paper offers a new methodology to identify R&D and innovation clusters, on the basis of a regional analysis of innovation support systems in Portugal. Using a web-based inventory of R&D and innovation agencies, an extensive data base is created. This data set is next analyzed by means of...

The potential relationship between domestic environmental regulation and internationalcompetitiveness has evoked various speculations. The common neoclassical train of thought is thatstrict environmental regulation is detrimental to the competitiveness of industry, and that itinduces phenomena...

This review considers the role of environmental effects in transport investment appraisal, mainly from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis, the most widely adopted appraisal technique. Although the basic principles of CBA are straightforward, several complications are identified that may...

Optimal harvesting of prey in a predator–prey ecosystem is studied under the condition that the existence of the predator has value. Predators (birds) and humans (fishers) compete for prey (shellfish). The behavior of the system is studied and conditions for optimal control are deduced....

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...