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- Akay, Alpaslan, 1975, et al.
(author)
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Remittances and Relative Concerns in Rural China
- 2015
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The paper investigates the impact of remittances on the relative concerns of households in rural China. Using the Rural to Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) dataset we estimate a series of well-being functions to simultaneously explore the relative concerns with respect to income and remittances. Our results show that although rural households experience substantial utility loss due to income comparisons, they gain utility by comparing their remittances with those received by their reference group. In other words, we find evidence of a “status-effect” with respect to income and of a “signal-effect” with respect to remittances. The magnitudes of these two opposite effects are very similar, implying that the utility reduction due to relative income is compensated by the utility gain due to relative remittances. This finding is robust to various specifications, controlling for the endogeneity of remittances and selective migration, as well as a measure of current migrants’ net remittances calculated using counterfactual income and expenditures.
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| 2. |
- Pfaff, A., et al.
(author)
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Protected areas' impacts on Brazilian Amazon deforestation: Examining conservation - Development interactions to inform planning
- 2015
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In: PLoS ONE. - : Public Library of Science. - 1932-6203. ; 10:7
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Protected areas are the leading forest conservation policy for species and ecoservices goals and they may feature in climate policy if countries with tropical forest rely on familiar tools. For Brazil's Legal Amazon, we estimate the average impact of protection upon deforestation and show how protected areas?forest impacts vary significantly with development pressure.We use matching, i.e., comparisons that are apples-to-apples in observed land characteristics, to address the fact that protected areas (PAs) tend to be located on lands facing less pressure. Correcting for that location bias lowers our estimates of PAs?forest impacts by roughly half. Further, it reveals significant variation in PA impacts along development- related dimensions: for example, the PAs that are closer to roads and the PAs closer to cities have higher impact. Planners have multiple conservation and development goals, and are constrained by cost, yet still conservation planning should reflect what our results imply about future impacts of PAs. © 2015 Pfaff et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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| 3. |
- Robalino, Juan, et al.
(author)
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Protected areas and economic welfare: An impact evaluation of national parks on local workers' wages in Costa Rica
- 2015
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In: Environment and Development Economics. - 1355-770X .- 1469-4395. ; 20:3, s. 283-310
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The number of protected areas around the world has significantly increased. However, the effects of this policy on the wellbeing of local households are still under debate. Using pre-treatment characteristics and household surveys with highly disaggregated geographic reference, we explore how national parks affect the wages of local workers in Costa Rica. We use matching techniques to control for the endogenous location of parks. We find that parks' effects on wages are, on average, positive and significant, but the magnitudes vary. Wages close to parks are higher for local workers living near tourist entrances. However, there is no robust evidence of positive effects for those close to parks but far away from tourist entrances. With our individual-level data, we also show that the positive effects on local households might not be as large as suggested by previous studies that use aggregated level data containing both local and immigrant households.
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