Essays on environmental and development policy analysis in developing countries: On trade and the environment, land use, and policy design at a landscape scale.
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文摘
The dissertation investigates the connections between development policies and environmental outcomes and also how to design environmental policy at a watershed scale with a focus on developing countries. The first essay establishes links between globalization, long term land degradation and welfare in a small open economy setting. It relates the links to three key variables: comparative advantage, myopia and environmental policy. It develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to show how weak environmental policies in developing countries undermine the potential gains from international trade. It argues that, without well defined property rights, developing countries could lose from globalization in the long run. The second essay empirically analyzes how small holders allocate land among annual crops and conservation uses in the Philippines. Random effects censored acreage share equations are estimated using simulated maximum likelihood technique. It sheds light on the importance of relative returns and relative wages in determining land use choices and in turn watershed degradation. This is the first paper to estimate systems of censored land share equations using panel data. In the third essay, we develop an economic model to examine a spatially explicit, heterogeneous environmental policy for water quality management for a small upland watershed in the Philippines. Using GIS data, we develop a large-scale non-linear programming model that assigns incentive policies for each land use practice and each location in the watershed. The model results reveal the trade-off between economic development, poverty reduction and environmental protection.