Edward Barbier of the University of Wyoming elaborates on the relevance of the polluter pays principle for the Paulson bailout plan.

Edward Barbier and Geoffrey Heal explain an emerging field aimed at valuing ecosystems, whose purpose is to help policy makers decide things like how best to get New York clean water or the role that expanded wetlands might play in limiting storm damage in New Orleans.

In the paper, using a political altruism model, we make an attempt to explain why an upstream country might agree to a treaty that recognizes and enforces the water claims of a downstream country. In a natural extension of the standard economic model, it is possible to explain the above...

The availability of basic assets influences peasants’ economic behavior, their livelihood diversification strategies and their responses to land degradation. In addition, when pressed by economic hardships households can also expected to work more than better off ones. Whether this implies...

Empirical evidence indicates that in Latin America and the Caribbean, households on less favored, or marginal, agricultural land form a “residual” pool of rural labor. Although the modern sector may be the source of dynamic growth through learning-by-doing and knowledge spillovers, patterns...

This paper introduces a theoretical model combining household production with an endogenous risk framework in order to understand how ex-ante private spending by coastal households would evolve against ex-post cyclone induced storm surge damage risk given the level of government protective...

This paper introduces a theoretical model that allows the estimation of a household’s valuation of health risks from major storms. An endogenous risk framework is developed in which the household can employ ex-ante self-protection and ex-post mitigating activities and treatments strategies to...

This paper introduces a household model of private investment in storm protection under an endogenous risk framework to determine how ex-ante self-protection and ex-post self-insurance spending by coastal households to mitigate storm-inflicted damages are affected by the availability of public...