Political Economy of Sustainable Development – Sustainable Development Doctoral Society

Journeys toward Sustainable Development: Policy Entrepreneurs and the Rise of the Green State in Chile and Peru

Posted on February 18, 2011 by mmd2172 in Political Economy of Sustainable Development

Project by Jose Carlos Orihuela (completed thesis):

Journeys inquire why and how mineral-rich Chile and Peru joined in the international trend of good green governance. Behind formal governance convergence hides effective institutional divergence: a relatively strong and autonomous green state in Chile and a relatively weak and captured green state in Peru. The “green state” comprises ministries of the environment, transsectoral regulatory agencies, national standards of environmental quality, systems of protected areas, and citizen participation schemes. Inquiring on the agency of policy-entrepreneurs , the dissertation shows how legacy, opportunity, and agency shape institutional change. The thesis uses a political economy approach, building on analytic frameworks and methods from institutional schools in the social sciences.

Distributive Impacts of Dams and Governmental Responses in County-level in China

Posted on February 18, 2011February 18, 2011 by mmd2172 in Ecosystem Services, Political Economy of Sustainable Development, Water Resource Management

Project by Xiaojia Bao:

This paper initially built a theoretical model for governments’ fiscal response with respect to the distributive impacts of dams along a river basin. The model claimed that upstream counties should get compensated, while downstream counties should compensate or transfer out, if the local governments were functioning efficiently. Then the paper verified the distributive impacts of dams on different areas along a river basin using empirical data in county level in China from 2000 to 2008. Empirical analysis indicated that dam construction and finished dams mainly had distributive impacts on agricultural economic outcome variables, such as primary industry valued added per capita and grain production. Local counties would suffer from agricultural loss due to the disruption from dam construction work and land loss for reservoir construction, but those areas were compensated correspondingly, which can be seen from the reduced deficit percentage. Upstream counties suffered from deteriorated economic outcome indicators both in agricultural and non-agricultural industries with GDP per capita decreased by 1540 RMB and net income per capita in rural households decreased by 147 RMB, while they got compensated to some extend through the revenue increase (close to 87 RMB per capita). Downstream counties benefited from dam construction on agricultural production, mainly in grain production and meat production, corresponding to a decrease in the expenditure (43 RMB per capita) and increase in revenue (122 RMB per capita).

Municipal Taxes, Income, and Rainfall

Posted on January 27, 2011January 27, 2011 by mmd2172 in Political Economy of Sustainable Development

Project by Aly Sanoh
This paper addresses three unresolved questions in the literature of public finance and development. First, it uses exogenous variation in rainfall across municipalities in Mali to estimate the causal effect of household income shocks on municipal level tax revenue performance. Second, it exploits a national tax collection incentive policy to measure the impacts of rainfall variation on local government spending. Third, it measures the effect of public goods capital spending on development outcomes at district levels.