Denna rapport är ett underlag till miljökonsekvensbeskrivningen för Eystrasaltprojektet och studerar vindkraftparkens inverkan på det svenska och finska yrkesfisket. Detta görs dels i termer av effekter på nationell ekonomisk aktivitet (förädlingsvärde och sysselsättning), och dels i termer av påverkan på enskilda fiskares situation (tillgång till fångstområden och påverkan på lönsamhet). 

Great hopes have been placed on devolution policies as a means of attaining sustainable forest management in developing countries. However, heavy dependence on forests by many rural households has led to forest degradation and deforestation, which undermine the success of such policies. This study contributes to the existing literature by exploring factors affecting perceived forest dependence and by introducing private forest ownership, i.e., forests cultivated on private land, into the analysis. The analysis was based on household cross-sectional survey data collected in the subsample areas of Njombe and Shinyanga, Tanzania. Ordered logit models were run to estimate the factors associated with perceived forest dependence. Findings show that private forest owners are associated with higher forest income shares than the non-private forest owners. Region dummy variable suggest that households in Njombe where private forestry is more reported are associated with a higher probability of perceiving themselves as highly forest dependents than those in Shinyanga. Household socio-economic characteristics are also found to correlate with households’ perceptions of their dependence on forests. The findings, thus, point to more research on the link between perceived forest dependence and conservation of forest resources in order to establish consolidated approaches to sustainably conserve communal and state forests. Concurrently, further studies on households’ ownership of forests on private lands are recommended.

Förlorade fiskeredskap utgör en viktig del av det marina skräpet och det finns en oro för att ackumuleringen av förlorade fiskeredskap kan få, eller redan har, en påtaglig påverkan på fisk- och skaldjursbestånd. Orsaken är att dessa fiskeredskap potentiellt kan fortsätta att fiska under lång tid efter det att de förlorats och att fångsten då inte kan tas tillvara, vilket brukar kallas för att redskapen ”spökfiskar”.

Andelen fiskenät som förloras årligen har, globalt, skattats till att i genomsnitt vara 5,7 % av de använda näten (mellan 0 och 79,8 % beroende på studie och område) och andelen förlorade burar har skattats till att i genomsnitt vara 8,6 % (mellan 0 och 88 %, beroende på studie och område). Även om variationen i förluster med andra ord är stor för bägge typer av redskap finns det, i de fiskeområden där det förloras redskap, en betydande risk för att spökfiskande redskap kan bidra till ett ”dolt” uttag från fisk- och skaldjursbestånden. Det skulle i sin tur kunna leda till att man underskattar fiskets totala uttag, och därmed riskerar uttaget att överskrida gällande fångstkvoter samt gränserna för ett hållbart uttag.

Det är således viktigt, utifrån målen om hållbart fiske och livskraftiga bestånd, att få en uppfattning av storleken på spökfiskets uttag inom de olika bestånden för att på så sätt få en korrekt bild av artens beståndsutveckling, samt vilka fångstuttag som kan rekommenderas när man tar spökfiskets uttag i beaktande. De olika redskapens kapacitet till spökfiske (fiskelivstid och fångstmängd) och deras miljöpåverkan skulle också kunna påverka vilka redskap som rekommenderas inom ett visst fiske (ex. trålning eller garnfiske), samt vilken design på redskapen som bör användas (till exempel biologiskt nedbrytbara nät, och biologiskt nedbrytbar garntråd (”spöktråd”) vid burfiske.

Förutom kunskap och förståelse kring spökfiskets omfattning är det för förvaltningen också ytterst betydelsefullt med kunskap kring hur kostnadseffektiva eventuella åtgärder mot spökfisket är. I både Sverige och många andra länder är den viktigaste åtgärden mot spökfiske, när redskapen väl tappats, att dragga efter dem. Det är därför viktigt ur ett förvaltningsperspektiv att få en bättre förståelse av huruvida draggning är ett kostnadseffektivt sätt att motverka spökfiskets effekter.

Both in the United States and in Europe there is ongoing work on reversing habitat fragmentation and the attendant loss in biodiversity in river systems caused by hydropower and other developments. Fish ladders and other measures are being introduced to restore the connectivity in river systems. In this paper, we set up a theoretical model to investigate what the conditions are for such an investment to be socially profitable. We find that, even in cases where it would have been socially preferable not to build hydropower installations in the first place, connectivity-restoring measures affecting the installations are not necessarily socially beneficial. This is the case for a wide range of plausible assumptions about discount rates, investment costs and productivity losses.

Tony Addison and Alan Roe (ed.), WIDER studies in development economics. Oxford University press, 2018, ISBN: 9780198817369

Forests support livelihoods and are a major source of energy for many households in developing countries. The aim of this paper is to review selected economic literature related to the role of household heterogeneities on forest dependence and on energy choices. The paper concludes that due to the presence of numerous market failures in developing countries, production and consumption decisions relating to forest use and energy use frequently become more complicated than in developed countries. Linked to this, household heterogeneities have considerable effects on forest dependence and energy preferences. However, additional research is still needed on the role of household heterogeneities on forest dependence and energy choices. Future studies should also focus on the energy path dependence by considering price elasticities to see how consumers respond to changes in shadow prices for different forest products and energy sources. 

The fertilizer subsidies reintroduced in various sub-Saharan African countries from 2007 aim to increase agricultural production and assist in the development of fertilizer markets. The present study evaluates the impact of a fertilizer subsidy program among farmers in Ghana who employ highly mechanized irrigation systems. The results indicate that farmers who received fertilizer under the subsidy program used 45% more fertilizer. However, they did not use more weedicide and were likely to reduce investment in soil and water conservation. Thus, the income gains resulting from the subsidy programs were not invested in such non-targeted inputs. Moreover, the program beneficiaries’ reduced investment in soil and water conservation may explain the finding that the subsidy did not improve their productivity. Thus, since fertilizer subsidy programs alone may not improve productivity, it may be necessary to target spending explicitly on complementary inputs such as investing in soil and water conservation.

Household agricultural production for self-consumption is often highlighted by nutritionists as the main route to increasing household food security and nutritional status, especially for the poor in developing countries. At the same time, the income gains from specializing in fewer crops and selling the surplus product could be an alternate route to improved nutritional status. We use Tanzanian data to study linkages between the diversity and market orientation of a household's agricultural production, the quality and diversity of their diets, and the nutritional status of their children. We find that diversifying a household's agricultural production significantly increases diversity in that household's diet, but the positive nutritional effects are small. We also find that market orientation has no clear effect on dietary diversity. At the same time, however, the nutritional status of children is not found to be linked clearly to general dietary diversity. On the other hand, factors such as education and overall income have strong and significant effects on both household dietary diversity and child nutrition. Thus, policies for increasing the quality of children's diets, improving children's nutritional status and enhancing the overall dietary diversity of farm households should incorporate those factors.

Land, as a valuable natural resource, is an important pillar of Rwanda’s sustainable development. The majority of Rwanda’s 80% rural population rely on agriculture for their livelihood, and land is crucial for agriculture. However, since a high population density has made land a scarce commodity, growth in the agricultural sector and plans for rapid urbanisation are being constrained, and cross-sectoral trade-offs are becoming increasingly important, with a risk that long-term sustainability may be threatened if these trade-offs are not considered. To help track land value trends and assess trade-offs, and to help assess the sustainability of trends in land use and land cover, Rwanda has begun developing natural capital accounts for land in keeping with the United Nations’ System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. This paper reports on Rwanda’s progress with these accounts. The accounting approach adopted in our study measures changes in land use and land cover and quantifies stocks for the period under study (2014–2015). Rwanda is one of the first developing countries to develop natural capital accounts for land, but the wide range of possible uses in policy analysis suggests that such accounts could be useful for other countries as well.

This paper studies how fisheries services are classified in the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework for trade in services and discusses the potential impact of unclear classifications. The WTO plays a key role in regulation and assessment in the area of trade in services, mainly due to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which contains the only set of multilateral rules managing such trade internationally. The purpose of GATS is to create a credible and reliable system of international trade rules that ensures fair treatment of all participants. Through negotiations, individual countries establish commitments to provide market access and limiting national treatment in various service sectors. During such negotiations, the classification of services is a prerequisite to ensure unambiguous and comparable commitments. However, the classification list used by the WTO, namely the W/120, is based on, and corresponds to, old versions of other classification lists, leading to unclear classifications. This lack of clarity in sectoral classifications makes policy analysis unnecessarily difficult and creates a risk that trade agreements may be interpreted differently by different parties.

The individual farmer has little incentive to care about the public good properties of on-farm biodiversity in the formof different crop varieties. There is a common assumption that, because of this, farmers will tend to maintain too littlebiodiversity on their farms compared with the social optimum. However, in developing countries, this assumption doesnot fit with the empirical data: because of poorly functioning insurance markets, farmers tend to maintain a wide rangeof different crop varieties to hedge against weather shocks and other uncertainties. In this paper we develop atheoretical model to account for this apparent contradiction, and show that farmers may in fact even maintain toomuch biodiversity on their farms, compared with the social optimum.

We replicate and reanalyse data from the randomised controlled trial of a programme originally carried out by Brune and colleagues to facilitate formal savings for Malawian tobacco farmers. The results from their study indicate that offering farmers access to personal savings accounts increased farmers’ banking transactions and enhanced the well-being of their households. Our pure replication, as well as our estimation analyses, support the conclusions from the original study. We also conducted a separate analysis focussing on the subset of farmers who chose to make use of the savings vehicles offered. We found that this subset of farmers, compared with the overall treatment group, had far greater positive effects on their agricultural output.

Swedish legislation makes municipalities responsible for recycling or disposing of household waste. Municipalities therefore play an important role in achieving Sweden’s increased levels of ambition in the waste management area and in achieving the goal of a more circular economy. This paper studies how two municipal policy instruments – weight-based waste tariffs and special systems for the collection of food waste – affect the collected volumes of different types of waste. We find that a system of collecting food waste separately is more effective overall than imposing weight-based waste tariffs in respect not only of reducing the amounts of waste destined for incineration, but also of increasing materials recycling and biological recovery, despite the fact that the direct incentive effects of these two systems  should be similar. Separate food waste collection was associated with increased recycling not only of food waste but also of other waste. Introducing separate food waste collection indirectly signals to households that recycling is important and desirable, and our results suggest that this signalling effect may be as important as direct incentive effects.

Watershed management is a complex activity with constraints on funding and human resources in many parts of the world, and there is a need for global effort to identify strategies that can work. To complement regulatory approaches, attention is now also being given to market-based incentives because of their potential cost-effectiveness. This study seeks to provide impetus to the use of the most successful market-based incentives to promote sustainable watershed practices through strengthening and increasing direct participation by local communities and the private sector. To identify proven market-based incentives for use to catalyze local community and private sector participation, a review of a sample of 26 purposively selected case studies from different contexts in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas is conducted. In reviewing those case studies, emphasis is placed on understanding the threats to specific watersheds, the market-based incentives used, the countrywide policy environment, the outcomes from the interventions, the factors for success and failure, and the pertinent policy issues in support of upscaling and the uptake of appropriate market-based approaches. The study identifies seven key policies that Governments should consider to upscale and facilitate the uptake of market-based incentives to promote participation by local communities and the private sector in watershed management.

We study Swedish implementation of the European Union’s Water Framework Directive, and compare the current implementation strategy with more flexible ‘bubble’ schemes, where measures can be traded among various locations within the same river system to reach the overall environmental target. Two different Swedish river systems, the Mörrum system with small-scale hydropower plants, and the Ångerman system with larger plants, are studied. We find that the environmental benefits that current policies are likely to accomplish could be achieved at well under half the cost in the Mörrum system, and at less than a tenth of the cost in the Ångerman system.

In this paper, we discuss the beginning of Rwanda’s current work on natural capital accounts. Many developing countries began similar work on environmental satellite accounts in the 1990s and early 2000s, only to abandon them a few years later when the initial political interest waned. The question arises, therefore, as to whether renewed interest in these accounts has the potential to have a longer-lasting impact on national accounting practices. In Rwanda’s case, the decision was to begin satellite accounting work by focusing on resources where key economic trade-offs between different uses had already begun to be identified by policymakers, and where the gathering of economic statistics had already been improved as a result. It seems likely that this approach could lead to more durable satellite accounts, and that a similar approach would be feasible in many other countries.

This study examines the farm-level economic benefits and aggregate welfare impacts of adopting push–pull technology (PPT)—an innovative, integrated pest and soil-fertility management strategy—with a set of household- and plot-level data collected in western Kenya. The evaluation is based on a combination of econometric and economic surplus analysis. Treatment effect estimates are used to assess the technology-induced shift in the maize supply curve, which is then used as an input to the economic surplus analysis. Finally, the aggregate poverty impact is computed using the economic surplus estimates. We observe that the adoption of PPT led to significant increases in maize yield and net maize income. The technology has significant potential benefit in terms of increasing economic surplus and reducing the number of people considered poor in western Kenya. Important factors influencing the decision to adopt PPT included access to information, household education, social capital, and social networks. We conclude that effective policies and development programmes for promoting PPT in Kenya should include information delivery and education mechanisms that are more effective.

We describe a public good experiment, a type of economic experiment commonly used to examine feelings of prosociality and community cohesion, carried out in Rwanda. Contributions in different parts of the country are affected by the local intensity of the 1994 genocide, with more generous contributions being made in areas where violence was greater. This supports earlier research indicating that conflict experience leads to greater prosociality. However, we also find that people who have not, themselves, been targets of violence give lower contributions than people who have. The considerable group-related and regional differences in social behaviour may have implications for the country's policies to deal with social cohesion.

This chapter provides a theoretical background on the issues surrounding rural microlending, and discusses experiences from earlier schemes. It explains the methodology used in the study. The chapter describes the data set used and provides some descriptive statistics. It also describes how the analysis was carried out in practice. The chapter presents the results, and discusses the policy implications of these results for rural upliftment strategies. Microfinance is not the first attempt to address this problem: many developing countries provided cheap, small-scale credit to smallholder farmers in the 1970s. Lenders face an adverse selection problem. They can discourage borrowers who have projects with low expected returns by charging high interest rates. Formal microcredit schemes are an attempt to use social pressure to encourage borrowers to repay their loans. Foreign donors have shown great interest in microfinance. In order to measure the shadow prices of working capital facing each group of farmers, a number of methods could potentially have been used.

We study genuine savings as an indicator of long-term welfare for Sweden for the period 1850 to 2000. Sweden has developed long series of comprehensive ‘green’ national accounts for this entire period and is, therefore, interesting as a testing ground for the hypotheses linking green accounting and sustainability. We find support for the weakest of the hypotheses in the theoretical literature on weak sustainability and genuine savings, namely that genuine savings are correlated with future economic well-being. However, the stronger hypotheses in this literature are not supported: there is no one-to-one relationship between genuine savings and prosperity, there is no indication that the relationship becomes stronger for longer time horizons, or with more comprehensive savings measures. The findings suggest that genuine savings, at least as currently measured in national accounts and satellite accounts, may not be a good forward-looking indicator of future prosperity.

Two systems working in parallel have contributed to implementation difficulties in Swedish water governance. While the old system is designed to be predictable and stable over time, the new system is intended to be transparent and holistic, guided by the principles of Integrated Water Resource Management. The paper disentangles the challenges in Swedish water governance and proposes a blueprint for future research. The proposed research project is unique in the sense that it explores the imbalances between the new and the old water governance systems from a multi-disciplinary perspective, elaborating upon the clashes between the traditional, nationally based regulatory system and the new holistic water governance system from legal, political and economic perspectives.

The commodity price booms of the early 1970s and of 2006–2014 wereboth associated with predictions of devastating scarcity of key natural resources, inpopular media as well as in science fiction. However, both price booms endedwithin a few years for largely similar reasons, linked to the economic incentives thathigh commodity prices create. Given the economic forces that ensure that spells ofresource scarcity usually do not last, writers of science fiction set in scarcity futures,especially fiction of the “if this goes on…” type, need to provide plausible reasonswhy those forces might stop working. This paper examines how authors describingresource-scarce future Earths have attempted to offer such reasons, and how thosereasons have evolved over time.

This article estimates the visitation demand function for Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP) in order to determine the scope for raising fees charged to international tourists in order to fund revenue-sharing schemes for local communities. International and Southern African Development Community tourists account for approximately 25% and 2% of the total number of visitors to South African national parks, with domestic visitors making up the remaining portion. Although small, the South African international tourism market is mature and accounts for a disproportionately large share (around 42%) of net revenue. To estimate visitation demand at the KTP and three other national parks, random effects Tobit Model was used. Using the estimated elasticities, the revenue-maximizing daily conservation fee was computed to be R1 131.94 (US$144.20) for KTP, which can be compared with the R180 (US$22.93) currently charged. Furthermore, the study also demonstrated that there is a possibility of raising fees at the other three parks. Sharing conservation revenue with communities surrounding parks could demonstrate the link between ecotourism and local communities’ economic development and promote a positive view of land restitution involving national parks.

The European eel stock is endangered. The European Union has, therefore, introduced strict policies to try to reverse the eel’s decline and reduce the threats to its survival. However, the European Union’s eel management policy has been implemented on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ basis, where all the affected countries have been given nearly identical targets, regardless of either the individual country’s costs for reducing damages to eels or its importance for the overall eel stock. In this paper, we draw on data from the different national eel management plans as well as from independent studies to compare the cost of measures to reduce eel mortality imposed in different countries. We compare the overall costs to those that could have been incurred with a union-wide, rather than fragmented, abatement program, and find that such a comprehensive management program would have been substantially cheaper and would have affected poorer member countries less.

In this paper, we study how the Swedish online gambling market has developed and how the availability of foreign-based online gambling has affected the domestic state-owned gambling monopoly, AB Svenska Spel. We find that online gambling and the traditional state-managed gambling are relatively weak substitutes. Thus, concerns about the availability of online gambling being able to undercut domestic gambling policies may be overstated.

This article studies anglers’ willingness to pay for improvements in the characteristics of fishing sites in the county of Jämtland in Sweden. We use two existing angling sites, and hypothetical sites similar to these, to explore transferability of responses between different sites and to examine the welfare effects of improvements in fishing site characteristics. We find that anglers have highly heterogenous preferences, and that modelling this heterogeneity using latent class models leads to different classes being estimated for the two different sites studied. This heterogeneity implies that policy interventions need to consider the specific characteristics of the angling groups being targeted by the intervention, but the heterogeneity also affects the precision with which estimates from one angling site can be applied to another site.

In this paper, we use Swedish Genuine Savings (GS) indicators, extended to account for a wider range of impacts on natural and human capital than previous GS indicators, to study Swedish long-term sustainability. Following Ferreira et al (2008) and Greasley et al (2014), technological progress and population effect are also included in the GS measures. We introduce a new quantitative methodology to the literature on sustainable development by applying Bayesian analysis of Dynamic Linear Models (DLMs) to GS indicators. This is the first time that parameter uncertainty has been used in examining the links between GS and long term well-being, providing new empirical evidence on the driving forces that underpin Swedish sustainable development.

The paper analyzes the economic impacts of climate change-induced fluctuations on the performance of Ethiopia’s agriculture, using a countrywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) model.We model the impacts on agriculture using a Ricardian model, where current agricultural production is modelled as a function of temperature and precipitation, among other things, and where future agriculture is assumed to follow the same climate function. The effect of overall climate change is projected to be relatively benign until approximately 2030, but will become considerably worse thereafter. Our simulation results indicate that, over a 50-year period, the projected reduction in agricultural productivity may lead to reductions in average income of some 20 per cent compared with the outcome that would have prevailed in the absence of climate change. This indicates that adaptation policies – both government planned and those that ease autonomous adaptation by farmers – will be crucial for Ethiopia’s future development.

In this paper we study how foreign ownership of Swedish companies affects employment and wages. To study these effects we specify a model based on the assumption that the Swedish labour market can be described as one where trade unions and employers bargain over employment and wages. Our hypothesis is that bargaining power is affected by institutional settings and the ownership of the firm. To test our hypothesis we used a panel data set of 242 large Swedish manufacturing firms over the period 1980–2005. The results indicate no significant impact of foreign ownership on employment or wages in Sweden.

A number of studies have found that foreign direct investment (FDI) can have positive impacts on productivity. However, while FDI has clearly positive impacts on technology transfers, its effects on resource use within firms is less clear and, in principle, efficiency losses might offset some of the productivity gains associated with improved technologies. In this paper, we study the impacts of FDI on efficiency in Swedish manufacturing. We find that foreign ownership has positive impacts on efficiency, supporting the earlier findings on productivity.

In Rwanda, rural water supply is not uniformly distributed. Rural areas arecharacterized by differences in the distance to the nearestwater point and in water quality for domestic water, by watering frequency and water availability for irrigationwater, and by the price for both. A household’s perception of further improvements in water supply will, therefore, depend heavily on the situation it currently faces. The authors used a choice experiment to model how the individual status quo (SQ) affects preferences. Accounting for individual SQ information improves model significance relative to simply using the generic SQ parameter in the model, and the willingness to pay increases. Not using this information leads to a downward bias – and, in some cases, statistical insignificance – in estimates of households’ valuation of health improvements linked to improved domestic water availability, as well as of increased watering frequency linked to the improved availability of irrigation water.

The Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative is a capacity building program in environmental economics focusing on research, policy interaction, and academic programs. The overall objective of EfD is to support poverty alleviation and sustainable development by building environmental economics capacity in policy making processes.