Morocco's argan oil is now the most expensive edible oil in the world. Growing high-value argan markets have sparked a bonanza of argan activity. NGOs, international and domestic development agencies, and argan oil cooperatives have promoted the win–win aim of simultaneously benefiting locals...

Concern about global climate change has elicited responses from governments around the world. These responses began with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and have continued with other negotiations, including the 2009 Copenhagen Summit. These negotiations raised important questions about whether countries...

Development agencies spend approximately US$ 400 million per year on landmine clearance. Yet many cost–benefit evaluations suggest that landmine clearance is socially wasteful because costs appear to far outweigh social benefits. This paper presents new estimates of the benefits of clearing...

This paper measures the impact of climate on Mexican agriculture using a Ricardian analysis. The analysis relies on economic data from 621 individual farms that were collected in 2002. Data on climate, elevation, soils, and distance to nearest city were matched with each farm. The analysis...

Migration literature has considered environmental constraints as one of the prime movers of populations, especially from dry regions, where water rather than land is the primary limiting factor. This study examines the impact of degradation of private as well as common pool land resources on...

This paper assesses the implications of large-scale investments in biofuels for growth and income distribution. We find that biofuels investment enhances growth and poverty reduction despite some displacement of food crops by biofuels. Overall, the biofuel investment trajectory analyzed...

This paper addresses the potential of <italic>in situ</italic> crop landrace conservation, employing market-based instruments, which pre-requires that (1) consumers hold positive use-value for the landrace attribute and (2) their willingness to pay covers both the transaction cost of implementing these...

Ferraro and Simpson (2002) argue that when markets are competitive, payments for environmental services (PES) are more cost-effective in achieving environmental goals than more indirect approaches such as subsidies to capital. However, when eco-entrepreneurs face non-price rationing in input or...

This paper applies a household production framework (Becker, 1971) to infer the economic value of a cultural heritage site, namely, the Petroglyph National Monument, situated in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. The empirical analysis uses benefit-transfer techniques from three source studies: those...

Accelerating economic growth and social development is necessary to reduce the vulnerability and enhance the adaptive capacity of sub-Saharan Africa to cope with the consequences of predicted unfavorable future climate. This requires major investments and policy reforms to induce a needed...