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| Narain, Urvashi; Gupta, Shreekant; van 't Veld, Klaas. |
| Using purpose-collected survey data from 537 households in 60 different villages of the Jhabua district of India, this paper investigates the extent to which rural households depend on common-pool natural resources for their daily livelihood. Previous studies have found that resource dependence- defined as the fraction of total income derived from common-pool resources-strongly decreases with income. Our study finds a more complex relationship. First, for the subsample of households that use positive amounts of resources, we find that dependence follows a U-shaped relationship with income, declining at first but then increasing. Second, we find that the probability of being in the subsample of common-pool resource users follows an inverse U-shaped... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Food Security and Poverty. |
| Ano: 2005 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10694 |
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| Narain, Urvashi; Bell, Ruth Greenspan. |
| Although there is general public approval of the improvements in Delhi's air quality in the recent years, the process by which this change was brought about has been criticized. A common perception is that air quality policies were prescribed by the Supreme Court, and not by an institution with the mandate for making environmental policy. A careful review of the policy process in Delhi suggests otherwise. We find that the government was intimately involved in policymaking and that the main role of the Supreme Court was to force the government to implement previously announced policies. A good understanding of what happened is essential, as the Delhi experience for instituting change has become a model for other Indian cities as well as neighboring countries. |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Air quality; Supreme Court; Compressed natural gas; Delhi; Environmental Economics and Policy; Q42; Q53; Q58. |
| Ano: 2005 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10466 |
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| Fisher, Anthony C.; Narain, Urvashi. |
| This paper develops two-period analytical and numerical models to study the question: given a stock of greenhouse gases that poses a risk of future damages of unknown magnitude, and the possibility of learning about damages, how do sunk abatement capital and a nondegradable stock of greenhouse gases affect optimal first-period investment? We show that both affect investment, the former negatively and the latter positively. Additionally, endogenous risk--the risk of damages dependent on the stock of gases-- results in an increase in optimal investment for any level of capital "sunkness" or greenhouse gas degradability. Quantitatively, though, the effect of sunk capital is much stronger than the effect of greenhouse gas irreversibility or that of... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Environmental Economics and Policy; Risk and Uncertainty. |
| Ano: 2002 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/25107 |
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| van 't Veld, Klaas; Narain, Urvashi; Gupta, Shreekant; Chopra, Neetu; Singh, Supriya. |
| Households in rural India are highly dependent on firewood as their main source of energy, partly because non-biofuels tend to be expensive. The prevailing view is therefore that, when faced with shortages of firewood in the village commons, such households, and especially the women in them, have to spend more and more time searching for firewood and eventually settle for poorer-quality biomass such as twigs, branches and dry leaves. Using data from a random sample of rural households in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, we come to very different conclusions, however. We find that households in villages with degraded forests do not spend longer hours searching for firewood, but instead switch to either using firewood from private trees or to using... |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Firewood crisis; Time allocation; Fuel switching; JFM; India; Resource /Energy Economics and Policy; O13; O18; Q23; Q42. |
| Ano: 2006 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/10591 |
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| Narain, Urvashi; Hanemann, W. Michael; Fisher, Anthony C.. |
| We define the irreversibility effect and demonstrate its importance in problems involving investment decisions under uncertainty. We establish several analytical and numerical results that suggest both that the effect holds more widely than generally recognized, and that an existing result (Epstein's Theorem) giving a sufficient condition for determining whether the effect holds can be applied more widely than previously indicated, in particular to problems involving intertemporally nonseparable benefit functions. We further show that a low elasticity of intertemporal substitution will however result in failure of the effect, but that the effect will hold if the value of information increases in the degree of flexibility. |
| Tipo: Working or Discussion Paper |
Palavras-chave: Risk and Uncertainty. |
| Ano: 2004 |
URL: http://purl.umn.edu/25101 |
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