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22. Environmental regulation in a transitional political system: delegation of regulation and perceived corruption in South Africa
- Author:
- Pedro Naso
- Publication Date:
- 09-2019
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- I study the economic motivations behind a reduction in the discretionary power of environmental regulators, and the impact that such reduction has on perceived corruption in South Africa. I examine the transition from the Air Pollution Protection Act of 1965 to the Air Quality Act of 2005, a change from full to partial delegation of regulation. By constructing a principal-agent model, I argue that this transition might have occurred because of an increase in the dispersion of rent-seeking motivations of public agents. This happens because, from the principal’s perspective, the possible harm— loose pollution control and misappropriation of environmental fines— generated by corrupt agents is greater than the potential benefits brought by diligent agents. In my empirical analysis, I use diff-indiffs models for a two-period panel with 191 South African firms to show that the regulatory change decreased treated firms’ perceived corruption, but did not improve other institutional quality measures.
- Topic:
- Climate Change, Economics, Environment, Regulation, and Pollution
- Political Geography:
- Africa and South Africa
23. Food security and land use in the 21st century: the return of Malthusianism
- Author:
- Timothy M. Swanson
- Publication Date:
- 12-2019
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- The coming century is set to pose many important problems regarding population, food requirements and land use. In many ways, the problem facing us is a stark reminder of Malthus’ predictions regarding the importance of resource constraints in the face of population growth. Despite questions concerning the core of the problems to be solved, there is little issue concerning the manifestations of these problems. First, we are seeing the culmination of a long-term process of human population growth, which commenced in earnest about 250 years previously (about the time of Malthus) and escalated thereafter, continuing to this day. A global population that was only about a million individuals in 1750, escalated to about two billion individuals in 1950, and has since increased to approximately seven billion.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Food, Population, Food Security, Land Rights, and Population Growth
- Political Geography:
- United Nations and Global Focus
24. Impacts of legal and regulatory institutions on economic development
- Author:
- Pedro Naso
- Publication Date:
- 12-2019
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- Since the second half of the 20th century, with the contributions of Coase, Williamson and North, the economic literature has emphasised the role of institutions in explaining differences in economic performance. According to the most diffused view, countries with good institutions will invest more in physical and human capital, will use productive factors in a more efficient way, and will achieve greater income level. But what are good institutions? And how should governments implement them? Answers to these questions have proven to be difficult mainly because of two characteristics of institutions: (i) institutional functioning is complex: the way institutions affect economic agents’ incentives is dependent on these agents’ individual preferences and the way they interact, which are difficult to predict; and (ii) they are context specific – the same institution in different contexts might result in a different economic outcome.
- Topic:
- Climate Change, Economics, Environment, Regulation, and Economic Policy
- Political Geography:
- Africa, South Africa, and Sierra Leone
25. Land grabs, big business and large-scale damages
- Author:
- Christophe Gironde
- Publication Date:
- 12-2019
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- The history of the world is a story of lands conquered by violence. Today, money has replaced weapons. Lands are bought. In very large quantities. The current wave of land grabbing is a phenomenon of hard conquest and a dramatic one for local populations and the environment.
- Topic:
- Environment, Land Law, Violence, Money, Land Rights, and Land
- Political Geography:
- South Asia
26. Do financing constraints matter for the direction of technical change in energy R&D?
- Author:
- Joëlle Noailly and Roger Smeets
- Publication Date:
- 03-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- The objective of this study is to examine the impact of firms' financing constraints on innovation activities in renewable (REN) versus fossil-fuel (FF) technologies. Our empirical methodology relies on the construction of a firm-level dataset for 1,300 European firms over the 1995-2009 period combining balance-sheet information linked with patenting activities in REN and FF technologies. We estimate the importance of the different types of financing (e.g. cash flow, long-term debt, and stock issues) on firms' patenting activities for the different samples of firms. We use count estimation techniques commonly used for models with patent data and control for a large set of firm-specific controls and market developments in REN and FF technologies. We find evidence for a positive impact of internal finance on patenting activities for the sample of firms specialized in REN innovation, while we find no evidence of this link for other firms, such as firms conducting FF innovation or large mixed firms conducting both REN and FF innovation. Hence, financing constraints matter for firms specialized in REN innovation but not for other firms. Our results have important implications for policymaking as the results emphasize that small innovative newcomers in the field of renewable energy are particularly vulnerable to financing constraints.
- Topic:
- Environment, Sustainable Development Goals, Green Technology, Renewable Energy, and R&D
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
27. Taking stock of international law responses to resource wars
- Author:
- Lys Kulamadayil
- Publication Date:
- 03-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- In the last 20 years, a significant body of literature has evolved around the phenomenon of resource wars. The term “resource war” is used to describe different linkages between natural resources and conflict. It refers to: (1) conflicts that are fought over access and control of scare, or valuable resources; (2) conflicts sustained through the trade with resources; (3) conflicts that involve the looting of the natural resources by an occupying power, and finally; (4) conflicts where the destruction of the environment or of industrial facilities serving resource exploitation is used as a strategy of warfare. Resource wars certainly have diverse legal implications, yet international law norms have primarily developed in response to the following sets of issues.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution, War, Natural Resources, Conflict, and Law of Armed Conflict
- Political Geography:
- United States and Sierra Leone
28. The new US tax credits and carbon negative technologies
- Author:
- Tim Flannery
- Publication Date:
- 03-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- It is no longer possible to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement – of keeping average global temperatures to ‘well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C1 - without removing large volumes of CO2 from the atmosphere.2 This will involve the development and deployment of carbon negative technologies at the gigatonne scale. Because developmental pathways for such technologies are likely to be decades-long, it is necessary that largescale investment begin now, if we hope to have mature technologies operating at the appropriate scale by 2050.
- Topic:
- Climate Change, Environment, Industrial Policy, Capitalism, Economic Growth, and Global Warming
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
29. The perils of development aid in resource-rich countries
- Author:
- Chiara Ravetti
- Publication Date:
- 03-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- The emergence of China and other new donors offering foreign assistance to mineraland land-rich African countries has spurred a renewed interest in the relationship between international aid and natural resources (Dreher and Fuchs, 2015; Dreher et al., 2018). Many low-income countries with valuable natural resources have historically received large amounts of aid from OECD donors (Fig. 1). Poor countries endowed with abundant fossil fuels or mineral reserves can have difficulties in converting their resource wealth into other forms of physical or human capital, because these subsoil assets take time to be managed, extracted and traded. Foreign aid can thus provide a complementary source of immediate liquidity for development. On the other hand, the provision of external finances has the potential to hinder political accountability, and ultimately economic development especially in countries with weak institutions.h countries
- Topic:
- Development, Humanitarian Aid, Foreign Aid, and Development Aid
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
30. Can there be benefits from competing legal regimes?: the impact of legal pluralism in post-conflict Sierra Leone
- Author:
- Pedro Naso, Erwin Bulte, and Tim Swanson
- Publication Date:
- 10-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- We investigate the impact of competition between legal regimes on the number of authoritative acts and amount of fines occurring in rural Sierra Leone. We model state and traditional legal systems as competing authorities with a potential for overlap in their jurisdictions. We are interested in the sign and magnitude of the legal pluralism externality in this region of overlapping authority. We then test the model and estimate the size of the externality coefficient in the context of post-conflict Sierra Leone. Our results show a negative externality between regimes for civil disputes—that is, an increase in the cost of apprehending a person. We also show that there is a reduction in the amount of fines per dispute collected in this shared space. Overall, this indicates that a potential benefit to the local people from multiple competing regimes is a reduction in expected authoritative expropriation.
- Topic:
- Civil War, Post-Conflict, and Legal Dualism
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Sierra Leone
31. The Porter Hypothesis Goes to China: Spatial Development, Environmental Regulation and Productivity
- Author:
- Pedro Naso, Yi Huang, and Tim Swanson
- Publication Date:
- 10-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- We examine the relationship between environmental regulation and competitiveness in China. Exploiting exogenous changes in national pollution standards for three industries—ammonia, paper and cement—we test whether environmental regulation increases industry productivity. Our results show that the strong version of the Porter hypothesis does not hold, but that regulation might reallocate productivity spatially. We show that regulated industries that are located in newly developing cities see an increase in their productivity as compared to the same industries in other cities. This means that environmental regulation is more likely to drive the spatial distribution of productivity changes than it is to drive the pace and direction of technological change.
- Topic:
- Development, Environment, Science and Technology, Regulation, Productivity, and Competition
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
32. The Impact of Energy Prices on Product Innovation: Evidence from the UK Refrigerator Market
- Author:
- François Cohen, Matthieu Glachant, and Marie Söderberg
- Publication Date:
- 01-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- This paper uses product-level data from the UK refrigerator market to evaluate the impact of electricity prices on product innovation. Our best estimate is that a 10% increase in the electricity price reduces the average energy consumption of commercialized refrigerator models by 2%. A large share of this reduction is explained by a reduction of freezing space. We also show that the exit of energy-inefficient products contributes more to energy reduction than the launch of new energy-efficient models. These findings suggest that innovation – the development of better technologies embodied in new products – does not respond strongly to energy price variations.
- Topic:
- Innovation, Electricity, Efficiency, and Energy
- Political Geography:
- United Kingdom and Europe
33. How Does Environmental Regulation Shape Economic Development? A Tax Competition Model of China
- Author:
- Pedro Naso and Tim Swanson
- Publication Date:
- 10-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- We propose a novel theoretical framework to study how environmental regulation shapes economic development in a developing country such as China. We develop a dynamic tax competition model in which local governments, located in development zones, use variation in taxes to attract workers to their jurisdictions. Their objective is to maximize tax revenue less local health costs that are proportional to local pollution. Our main result is that competition generates a reallocation of productive factors when national regulation is introduced. Local governments in more productive regions set greater production taxes than in other regions. This makes workers and output to shift from more to less developed regions of the country.
- Topic:
- Environment, Regulation, Tax Systems, Economic Development, and Competition
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
34. Follow-the-Leader? Measuring the Internalisation of Law
- Author:
- Shaun Larcom, Luca Panzone, and Tim Swanson
- Publication Date:
- 01-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- Expressive law is said to induce compliance with stated principles without a price on noncompliance. We empirically assess this proposition, by attempting to dis-entangle the impacts of a legal change (a 5p charge on use of plastic bags), on individual choices. We do so by measuring both behaviours and attitudes across the first two months of the legal change, and by comparing the impacts across neighboring jurisdictions both with and without the change. Using mediation analysis, we find that the self-reported change in internal motivation explains only about 10% of the change in behaviour. Interestingly, we find that the scale of the sanction (charge) is both irrelevant (because jurisdictions without sanctions still exhibit changed behaviour) and important (because the size of the sanction signals the reasonableness of the law).
- Topic:
- Law, Behavior, and Internalization of Law
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
35. Driven up the wall? Role of environmental regulation in innovation along the automotive global value chain
- Author:
- Suchita Srinivasan
- Publication Date:
- 06-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- Are environmental regulations imposed on downstream firms effective in spurring innovation in clean technologies by upstream firms? We use a novel firm-level dataset of global scope to study whether environmental regulations have percolated up the automotive global value chain, and led to innovation (measured by patenting in abatement technologies) by suppliers at different levels of the chain. Using a Poisson estimation methodology, we find that suppliers worldwide have responded to increasingly stringent emission standards imposed on automobile manufacturers (also known as original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs) by undertaking more innovation in clean abatement technologies; additionally, we find that the smaller the gap between the average environmental regulation suppliers face from the OEMs, and that in the country where the firm is located, the more the firm innovates. In addition, we provide evidence of a spread of these positive effects of regulation on innovation, with suppliers at different upstream levels responding positively to the downstream standards. This paper has important policy implications for the design of environmental policy instruments to induce innovation in clean technologies by firms along the value chain.
- Topic:
- Environment, Regulation, Global Value Chains, Patents, and Automotive Industry
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
36. Discrimination and Favouritism Among Workers: Union Membership and Ethnic Identity
- Author:
- Chiara Ravetti, Mare Sarr, Tim Swanson, and Daniel Munene
- Publication Date:
- 10-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- This paper analyses how labour institutions and ethnic identity shape favouritism and discrimination among workers. We conduct an experiment with union and non-union South African mineworkers from various ethnicities. We examine in-group and out-group behaviour, emphasizing the relative ranking of these groups and their interaction. We find that unions create both in-group and out-group favouritism towards co-ethnic members and members of ethnic majorities. This favouritism is however undermined by unionised subcontract workers who experience precarious conditions. Furthermore, union members discriminate against non-unionised ethnic minorities. Finally, non-union members (primarily subcontract workers) discriminate against union members, particularly after negative shocks.
- Topic:
- Ethnicity, Discrimination, Mining, Labor Market, and Trade Unions
- Political Geography:
- Africa and South Africa
37. Transfer of Improved Varieties in Informal Markets and the Diffusion of Embedded Innovation: Experimentation with Genetic Resources in Uganda
- Author:
- Bozzola Martina, Tim Swanson, and Helena Ting
- Publication Date:
- 01-2016
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- We look at the diffusion of seed technology among Ugandan farmers. We present a targetinput model to conceptualize the adoption decisions of a new technology in which the best use of inputs is unknown. In this framework, there is path dependency in the adoption process. We show that the group of innovators is well-defined but too small to overcome the system’s inertia. We find little evidence that seed policy reforms implemented in Uganda in the past 20 years boosted agricultural productivity, largely on account of a lack of local experimentation and inadequate use and diffusion of new seed varieties.
- Topic:
- Markets, Farmers, Peer Effects, and Seeds
- Political Geography:
- Uganda and Africa
38. The Impact of Green Innovation on Energy Intensity: An Empirical Analysis for 14 Industrial Sectors in OECD Countries
- Author:
- Jules-Daniel Wurlod and Joëlle Noailly
- Publication Date:
- 03-2016
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- This paper analyses the impact of green innovation on energy intensity in a set of 14 industrial sectors in 17 OECD countries over the 1975-2005 period. We create a stock of green patents for each industrial sector and estimates a translog cost function to measure the impact of green innovation on energy intensity, next to other factors such as input substitution and autonomous technical change. We find that green innovation has contributed to the decline in energy intensity in the majority of sectors: the median elasticity of energy intensity with respect to green patenting is estimated at -0.03 in our sample. Hence, a 1% increase in green patenting activities in a given sector is associated with a 0.03% decline in energy intensity. The magnitude of the effect is larger in energy-intensive sectors and in more recent years. We also find that the impact of an additional green patent on energy intensity is larger than an average non-green patent. Our results are robust to alternative definitions of patents.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Green Technology, Innovation, Industry, Patents, OECD, and Energy
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
39. Environmental Regulations and Competitiveness: Evidence based on Chinese firm data
- Author:
- Ankai Xu
- Publication Date:
- 01-2016
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- This paper provides empirical evidence in support of the Porter hypothesis that tighter environmental regulations can increase productivity under certain circumstances. It builds on a theoretical model in which environmental regulations induce firms to adopt more efficient technologies. Using Chinese firm-level data covering a ten-year period, the empirical study examines the effects of two specific policy instruments - the pollution levy and regulatory standards - on firm productivity. It finds a bell-shaped relationship between pollution levies and the total factor productivity of firms, indicating that an increase in the pollution levy rate can be associated with higher productivity. In addition, the study investigates the effect of pollution emission standards on firm productivity and identifies an initial negative effect which diminishes after a period of two to three years.
- Topic:
- Environment, Regulation, Innovation, and Productivity
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
40. Why Give Aid to Resource-Rich Autocrats?
- Author:
- Mare Sarr, Chiara Ravetti, and Tim Swanson
- Publication Date:
- 11-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- Why give aid to resource-rich autocrats? We find that the interaction between natural resources and most forms of international aid results in enhanced political instability in most autocratic countries. Interestingly, some types of government aid (notably humanitarian aid) do not have this effect, indicating that the impact of aid varies with its form. Furthermore, we find that only aid structured in the form of loans (rather than grants) is more likely to flow toward resource-rich autocracies. This combination of loans with any political instability they may induce, can create speculative rights (for the donor) in the resource-riches of the recipient country. This potential claim on resources provides one important strategic reason to give aid to resource-rich autocrats. Aid can act as a form of foreign intervention in the pursuit of regime change, and claims on resources.
- Topic:
- Foreign Aid, Economic Growth, Dictatorship, Autocracy, Resource Management, and Looting
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus