Conference Agenda

Addressing rural poverty through renewable energy initiatives offers a sustainable pathway for economic and environmental development. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the Solar Energy for Poverty Alleviation Program (SEPAP) in China, utilizing a comprehensive dataset that combines satellite and official data across a wide range of counties over an extended period. Advanced econometric methods, including staggered difference-in-difference, event study designs, and synthetic controls, are employed to rigorously assess the program's impacts while controlling for potential biases. The analysis reveals significant increases in vegetation index and nightlight intensity in counties that participated in SEPAP, indicating a shift towards sustainable energy and enhanced economic activities. Further robustness checks, which exclude counties benefiting from multiple interventions, demonstrate the persistence of nightlight intensity effects, although the impact on vegetation index diminishes. These findings highlight the critical role of SEPAP in promoting economic growth and environmental sustainability in rural China, providing valuable insights into the scalability and effectiveness of renewable energy projects in addressing rural poverty.

This article investigates the unintended consequences of land use right restrictions on deforestation in Vietnam, shedding light on a crucial yet underexplored aspect of land tenure rights that applies to several contexts. While an extensive literature studies the economic and environmental impacts of tenure security and transfer rights, limited attention has been given to government-imposed restrictions on land use rights. The objective of this study is to understand how land use right restrictions affect the opportunity cost of forest clearing. The study focuses on Vietnam, where a significant portion of agricultural land is compulsorily dedicated to rice cultivation under the Rice Land Designation Policy (RLDP). This policy, enforced at the local level, sets specific targets for rice cultivation, effectively restricting land use rights. The analysis takes advantage of a unique two-wave panel dataset on land use at the commune level, obtained by merging two Vietnam rural censuses covering 56 million individuals with geospatial information on tree cover loss, and geospatial information on the exact land designed to be cultivated under rice according to the RLDP. Our findings reveal a strong nexus between cropland expansion and tree cover loss, with the relationship being more pronounced in communes subject to land use constraints imposed by RLDP. When cropland expansion occurs in areas with land use restrictions, the impact on tree cover loss is significantly higher. Access to markets appears to mitigate the detrimental effect of cropland expansion under these restrictions, suggesting that economic opportunities in urban areas may deter farmers from expanding cropland at the expense of forests. With Vietnam experiencing substantial deforestation, this research provides insights that can inform policies aimed at reducing deforestation levels.

As the world urbanises rapidly, cities experience unprecedented population growth, especially in poorer countries. In this paper, we study the potential trade-off in the use of urban land that comes with urban growth, namely between greenness and needed living and working space. We do so by building a novel and unique panel dataset combining gridded data on population, area, built-up surface and volume, urban greenness, and nighttime lights (as a proxy for economic activity). Our global sample covers over 1000 cities over the 1990-2020 period. Using our sample, we identify key global stylised facts, as well as main differences across world regions. Relying on panel-data econometric techniques, we provide estimates for the elasticity of economic activity and greenness to population density, and explore heterogeneities across income levels and different city sizes. Our findings suggest a trade-off between greenness and economic activity, mainly driven by (increasing) population density in cities. We also dig into different patterns of city growth and create a “Bright and Green Index” to categorize cities in our sample. We find cities in upper-middle income countries to have the largest improvements in the index, with large cities in low-income countries doing significantly worse. Our analysis provides insights to explain these differences and on the potential role of public policy to make cities bright and green.

We study the heterogeneity of preferences regarding the limited substitutability of environmental public goods vis-a-vis private consumption goods and how it affects the economic valuation of environmental public goods. We show theoretically that mean marginal willingness to pay for an environmental public good decreases in society’s mean substitutability preference and increases in the heterogeneity of individual-level substitutability preferences. We then introduce an experimental framework to elicit individual-level substitutability preferences for the first time directly, which we apply to study general population preferences concerning the trade-off between market goods and forest ecosystem services. We estimate preference parameters for around 1,500 individuals and document substantial preference heterogeneity. The majority of individual preferences imply a complementary relationship, with a median elasticity of substitution (complementarity) of around 0.4 (2.5). We illustrate how accounting for the heterogeneity in substitutability preferences may considerably increase the societal value attached to environmental public goods. These findings are relevant for environmental cost-benefit analysis and for the comprehensive accounting of public natural capital.