Copyright (c) 2013 University of Rhode Island All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs Recent documents in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics Faculty Publications en-us Mon, 20 May 2013 09:10:15 PDT 3600 http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/5 http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/5 Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:40:14 PDT Self-governance of natural resources has started to gain increasing attention as an alternative to command-and-control and market-based tools. However, a fundamental question remains: is self-governance economically beneficial, allowing it to serve as an alternative management tool? This paper uses a unique set of survey data from a territorial-user-right-based South Korean inshore (maul) fishery and applies an empirical strategy to provide some of the first quantitative evidence that self-governance benefits maul fishermen.We find that members of the self-governance group perceive the management system as having had a positive impact on four out of the eight criteria we tested: stock recovery, curtailed fishing effort, reduced disputes among fishermen and declining incidents of illegal fishing. Considering that these groups have been in existence on average for less than seven years, these results indicate that the management scheme has made good progress overall.

]]> Emi Uchida et al. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/4 http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/4 Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:50:27 PDT Self management of natural resources has started to gain increasing attention as an alternative tool to command-and-control and market-based tools, but the fundamental question remains: is self management economically beneficial such that it should be promoted in the first place? This article uses a unique set of survey data from South Korea and applies an empirical strategy to provide some of the first quantitative evidence that self management is benefiting the fishermen. We find that positive benefits of fishery self management—an increase in fishery revenue and reduction in cost—are perceived by member fishermen, which is a good start considering the average number of years since the establishment of these self-management groups is only about seven. Empirical results of the magnitude of change in profit showed some consistent results, although the estimates were not as robust. These results suggest that the impact of fishery self management is still in progress. Thus, the government should maintain its current position to support self management as the country’s fishery management policy.

]]> Hirotsugu Uchida et al. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/3 http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/3 Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:10:33 PDT Transportation costs are of central importance in the New Economic Geography literature, though assumptions about transportation costs continue to be simplistic. This paper begins to address these simplifications by assuming that transportation costs for manufactured goods are heterogeneous. Basic results are consistent with standard models showing dispersion of economic activity for high transport costs and eventual agglomeration as transport costs decline. However, several novel features arise too. Many unstable, dispersed equilibria exist for high average transport costs, but converge to a stable equilibrium path as transport costs decrease. Equilibrium paths smoothly transition from dispersion to agglomeration and do so at an increasing rate. Additionally, transport costs directly influence firms’ location decisions and firms spatially sort by transport cost.

]]> Corey Lang http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/2 http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/2 Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:28:07 PDT Proper targeting of policy interventions requires reasonable estimates of the benefits of the alternative options. To inform such decisions, we develop an integrated approach stemming from the small-area estimation literature that estimates the marginal returns to a range of assets across geographically defined subpopulations. We create a series of maps that can be overlaid with traditional poverty maps to identify strong candidate areas for intervention, though an efficiency/equity tradeoff sometimes exists. We apply our method using recent Ugandan data. Results are consistent with independent empirical findings and suggest asset specific transfer schemes would improve with a spatially targeted strategy.

]]> Corey Lang et al. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/1 http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/enre_facpubs/1 Wed, 05 Sep 2012 07:35:08 PDT Robert J. Johnston et al.