Explore the vast range of titles available.

The purpose of this study is to review theoretical and empirical findings in economics with respect to the challenging question of how to manage invasive species. The review revealed a relatively large body of literature on the assessment of damage costs of invasive species; single species and groups of species at different geographical scales. However, the estimated damage costs show large variation, from less than 1 million USD to costs corresponding to 12% of gross domestic product, depending on the methods employed, geographical scale, and scope with respect to inclusion of different species. Decisions regarding optimal management strategies, when to act in the invasion chain and which policy to choose, have received much less attention in earlier years, but have been subject to increasing research during the last decade. More difficult, but also more relevant policy issues have been raised, which concern the targeting in time and space of strategies under conditions of uncertainty. In particular, the weighting of costs and benefits from early detection and mitigation against the uncertain avoidance of damage with later control, when the precision in targeting species is typically greater is identified as a key challenge. The role of improved monitoring for detecting species and their spread and damage has been emphasized, but questions remain on how to achieve this in practice. This is in contrast to the relatively large body of literature on policies for mitigating dispersal by trade, which is regarded as one of the most important vectors for the spread of invasive species. On the other hand, the literature on how to mitigate established species, by control or adaptation, is much more scant. Studies evaluating causes for success or failure of policies against invasive in practice are in principal non-existing.

Climate change is expected to affect precipitation and temperature, with consequences for water availability and sanitation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how precipitation and temperature affect households’ decisions on sanitation facilities that vary in their dependence on water for operation. To this end, we use household-level panel data from the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey in combination with location-matched, high-resolution weather data. Employing a panel fixed-effects regression model, the findings reveal that higher precipitation is significantly associated with an 18% lower (higher) likelihood of using improved (unimproved) sanitation facilities, respectively. Higher temperature has the opposite effect. Both precipitation and temperature have heterogeneous impacts: the effect of precipitation is significant only in male-headed households, while temperature affects the use of shared improved facilities in towns and urban areas. One potential explanation for the influence of precipitation is that heavy precipitation can disrupt access to piped water and sanitation networks by causing physical damage to infrastructure. Furthermore, higher temperature may accelerate the decomposition of solids in septic tanks, thereby reducing the need for water. These findings could help policymakers and practitioners implement evidence-based sanitation interventions to increase access to improved sanitation facilities.

This paper investigates the role of social capital in influencing individuals’ willingness to contribute to environmental protection in Sweden. Four indices of social capital comprising social trust, institutional trust, civic participation and a composite index comprising all considered elements of social capital were constructed to analyse their respective association with individual decisions to contribute. Using data from the environment module of the 2010 International Social Survey Programme, we empirically show that all four social capital parameters are significant and robust drivers of Swedish public’s willingness to contribute when the payment vehicles are increased higher prices or taxes or through lifestyle changes to protect the environment. Statistically, a significant association was observed for social trust and civic participation. Institutional trust is not significant when the payment vehicle is a reduction in the standard of living. Overall, however, the composite index of social capital is a robust predictor of likelihood to contribute irrespective of the payment vehicle.

The benefits and costs of wildlife are contingent on the spatial overlap of animal populations with economic and recreational human activities. By using a production function approach with dynamic spatial panel data models, we analyze the effects of human hunting and carnivore predation pressure on the value of ungulate game harvests. The results show evidence of dynamic spatial dependence in the harvests of roe deer and wild boar, but not in those of moose, which is likely explained by the presence of harvesting quotas for the latter. Results suggest the impact of lynx on roe deer harvesting values is reduced by 75% when spatial effects are taken into account. The spatial analysis confirms that policymakers’ aim to reduce wild boar populations through increased hunting has been successful, an effect that was only visible when considering spatial effects.

This paper addresses the issue of whether or not social capital explains per capita CO2 emissions dynamics in Swedish counties in an augmented environmental Kuznets curve framework. By accounting for issues of endogeneity in the presence of dynamic and spatial effects using geo-referenced emissions data, we show that per capita carbon emissions in a county matters for other counties and that net of economic, demographic and environmental factors, social capital has the potential to reduce carbon emissions in Sweden albeit less robustly. We test two different social capital constructs; trust in government and environmental engagement. Specifically, trust in the government inures to the reduction in CO2 emissions. Membership and engagement in environmental organisations reduces CO2 emissions only through its interaction with per capita income or trust. The implication of our estimates suggest that investment geared toward increasing the stock of social capital could inure to reductions in CO2 emissions in addition to climate policy instruments in Sweden

This paper examined the effect of mining on household income and welfare and how such effects are distributed over different quantiles of income and welfare. Using the three most recent rounds of the Ghana Living Standards Surveys together with information on the location of gold mines during the survey years, we estimated effects of living in a mining area on real gross income, employment income, and real per capita household expenditure (a proxy for welfare) using average and quantile treatment effect models. We find robust evidence of negative effect of mining on household income and welfare. Our results also indicate that the income reducing effect of mining activity falls heavily on households at bottom of the income distribution. In the case of household welfare, the interesting revelation from our result is that the negative effect of mining falls largely on both the lower and upper ends of the welfare distribution, with much heavier burden at the lower relative to the upper tail. Our paper, thus, provides ample evidence that mining activity does not only reduce income and welfare, but further increases inequality in the distribution of income and welfare.

This paper applies a local-linear non-parametric kernel regression technique to examine the effect of macroeconomic factors on stock market performance in Ghana. We show that the popular parametric specification in the existing literature suffers from functional misspecification. The evidence suggests that the relationship is non-linear and hence the implied elasticities are non-constant, contrary to findings in the literature. The main finding of the study suggests that stock prices are significantly affected by macroeconomic fundamentals and oil price shocks albeit weakly. This reinforces the need to closely monitor behaviour of macroeconomic indicators while sustaining prudent macroeconomic policy management.