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Category: Conceptual

Payments for Ecosystem Services: why precision and targeting matter

Published January 1, 2007 by Alex Pfaff
Francisco Alpizar, Allen Blackman, Alexander Pfaff
Resources 2007 volume 165:20-22

PDF link iconEven a perfect measure of the ecosystem services provided by each parcel enrolled in a PES program would be insufficient to measure the overall effectiveness of the program. The simple reason is that if a PES program does not lead to an increase in the provision of ecosystem services compared to what would have happened in the absence of the program—that is, the baseline or “counterfactual”—then it has not accomplished anything. Imagine a PES program focused on forest conservation that makes payments to managers of ecologically rich forest land, who have no incentive to clear the land because it is illsuited for logging, agriculture, or urbanization. Payments to these managers would have little impact on deforestation because the risk of clearing was minimal to begin with. In contrast, payments to managers who have incentives to clear their land would be much more likely to have an impact.

 

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Ensuring Safe Drinking Water in Bangladesh

Published January 1, 2006 by Alex Pfaff
M.F. Ahmed, S. Ahuha, M. Alauddin, S.J. Hug, J.R. Lloyd, A. Pfaff, T. Pichler, C. Saltikov, M. Stute, A. van Geen
Science volume 314 (December 15, 2006): 1687-1688

PDF link iconExcessive levels of arsenic in drinking water is a vast health problem in Southeast Asia. Several viable approaches to mitigation could drastically reduce arsenic exposure, but they all require periodic testing.

 

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Household Production and Environmental Kuznets Curves

Published January 9, 2004 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Shubham Chaudhuri, Howard L.M. Nye
Environmental and Resource Economics 27: 187–200, 2004.

PDF link iconThis paper provides a theoretical explanation for the widely debated empirical finding of “Environmental Kuznets Curves”, i.e., U-shaped relationships between per-capita income and indicators of environmental quality. We present a household-production model in which the degradation of environmental quality is a by-product of household activities. Households can not directly purchase environmental quality, but can reduce degradation by substituting more expensive cleaner inputs to production for less costly dirty inputs. If environmental quality is a normal good, one expects substitution towards the less polluting inputs, so that increases in income will increase the quality of the environment. It is shown that this only holds for middle income households. Poorer households spend all income on dirty inputs. When they buy more, as income rises, the pollution also rises. they do not want to substitute, as this would reduce consumption of non-environmental services for environmental amenities that are already abundant. Thus, as income rises from low to middle levels, a U shape can result. Yet an N shape might eventually result, as richer households spend all income on clean inputs. Further substitution possibilities are exhausted. Thus as income rises again pollution rises and environmental quality falls.

 

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Endowments, preferences, technologies and abatement: growth-environment microfoundations

Published January 7, 2004 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Shubham Chaudhuri, Howard L.M. Nye
Int. J. Global Environmental Issues (2004) volume 4 number 4: 209-228

PDF link iconWill economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development? We present a household-level framework emphasising the trade-off between consumption that causes pollution and pollution-reducing abatement. Our model provides a simple explanation for upward-turning, non-monotonic paths of environmental quality during economic growth. Its innovation yields sufficient conditions that simultaneously address preferences and technologies. With standard preferences, an asymmetric endowment (i.e., at zero income, consumption is also zero but environmental quality is positive) leads low-income households not to abate, and further this condition is sufficient for an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for a wide range of abatement technologies. Without such an endowment, however, even strong economies of scale in abatement are, on their own, insufficient for an EKC

 

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Aid, economic growth and environmental sustainability: rich-poor interactions and environmental choices in developing countries

Published January 6, 2004 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Paulo Barelli, Shubham Chaudhuri
Int. J. Global Environmental Issues (2004) volume 4 numbers 1/2/3: 139-159

PDF link iconRich-poor interactions complicate the search for a stable Environmental Kuznets Curve (an ‘inverted U’ relationship between income per-capita and environmental degradation). We show that aid from richer to poorer countries to support investments in environment, in either of two forms, alters the income-environment relationships that otherwise exist, lowering levels of degradation in the poorer countries conditional upon their incomes. Yet even with environmental aid, in our model environmental quality eventually falls as economic growth continues, although ongoing innovation could change that conclusion. In light of this result, we show that subsidies to clean goods, one form of technological-transfer aid programme, dominate income transfers as environmental aid policy by the rich. Given that aid matters, we then show that when rich countries degrade the environment, a perverse effect exists: when an aid-giving country becomes richer, it gives less aid to the poor country. This is stronger when that degradation is durable, that is, when consumption and degradation by the rich country in the past has durable effects upon the environment.

 

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To Err on Humans is not Benign: incentives for adoption of medical error-reporting systems

Published January 3, 2004 by Alex Pfaff
Joshua Graff Zivin, Alexander Pfaff
Journal of Health Economics 23 (2004) 935–949

PDF link iconConcerns about frequent and harmful medical errors have led policy makers to advocate the creation of a system for medical error reporting. Health providers, fearing that reported information about errors would be used against them under the current medical malpractice system, have been reluctant to participate in such reporting systems.We propose a re-design of the malpractice system – one in which penalties are a function of the health provider’s reporting efforts – to overcome this incentive problem.We also consider some alternatives to this mechanism that address two important ways in which reporting effort may not be observable: hospitals may have interests distinct from individual physicians and may not be able to observe their reporting efforts, and a regulatory agency or a court may not be able to adequately observe reporting efforts by a provider.

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