Prospects of a Trilateral Trans-Himalayan Economic Cooperation Agreement (THECA): China, Nepal, and India

For decades, small countries in South Asia have had to rely on India for economic assistance and the trade and transit outlets. Sometimes, it was not uncommon for them to feel Indian leverage in matters related to national politics. For a long time, China had maintained a low key approach to dealing with these small neighbors in South Asia. Chinas new found prosperity, its natural resources needs, and their pursuit to seek alternate maritime passages have all changed the South Asian dynamics in a significant way. This thesis argues that both India and China are much better off looking at these smaller neighbors as a land of opportunity rather than a platform for rivalry. We begin with Nepal as an example. With the enhanced growth and economic clout at the global stage, India and China are both forging various individual bilateral economic linkages with the smaller South Asian neighbors. A newly formed economic alliance between China and Sri Lanka to develop Hambantota port on the southern tip of the island is the latest example. Another SAARC member Bangladesh is collaborating with China to open a transportation outlet into Myanmar. India is also courting Bangladesh for natural gas supplies and looking into its transportation network within Bangladesh as a transit corridor to reach the north-eastern frontier states, and perhaps beyond into Myanmar. Oil explorations, transit rights, hydro development, and seaport access are other examples. So, a proposal from a transit corridor country like Nepal for a trilateral economic cooperation with India and China should be welcomed as a natural economic reality made possible by the unprecedented growth trajectories of the two rising economic giants.\u2

Joint regression analysis of the effect of climate risk on food security in rural Nepal: Using Copula approach

This paper analyzes the effect of climate risk on food security in rural Nepal, utilizing the Nepal Living Standard Survey data and climate risk index data. We construct two indicators for food security, caloric intake per capita and food diversity, which captures comprehensive information of food security. The copula method, which allows us to obtain flexible bivariate parametric model for the continuous-count data, is used to simultaneously estimate the caloric intake and food diversity models

Governance and Performance: Theory-Based Evidence from US Coast Guard Inspections

Given three stylized facts about the US Coast Guard (USCG), namely, soft penalties for safety violations, low incidence of penalties relative to the number of violations, and substantial resources devoted to inspections of vessels, this paper seeks (i) a theoretical lens to view USCG activities and (ii) an empirical assessment of whether those activities improve performance. Harrington’s (1988) model is motivated by these stylized facts about US regulation in general, and provides a solution via targeting of good and poor performers. The model generates hypotheses about optimal regulation in the context of pollution prevention activities of the USCG. An organization-level panel data set consisting of thousands of US flag tank barges is constructed to test those hypotheses. A count model that controls for vessel heterogeneity yields mixed evidence. If USCG inspections are considered exogenous variables (as the theory presumes), they appear to prevent pollution spills. But if inspections are endogenous and respond to previous spills then correcting for endogeneity reverses the earlier result. In addition, violations are found to be good predictors of pollution occurrences, suggesting that inspections are not as effective as they could be. Targeting as in Harrington’s model therefore appears to be incomplete, and the findings suggest that more complete targeting could increase performance. An interesting finding is that stronger penalties could increase performance.Harrington model; Inspections; Penalties; Oil Spills; USCG;

POLICY CHANGES AND THE DEMAND FOR LOTTERY-RATIONED BIG GAME HUNTING LICENSES

Lotteries are commonly used to allocate big game hunting privileges. In this study, lottery demand and consumer surplus are modeled before and after policy changes designed to increase participation. The application is to New Mexico elk hunt lotteries. Given the volume and variety of hunts, we adopt a disaggregated and flexible count modeling approach. Two welfare measures are estimated: Marshallian surplus and a proposed measure that incorporates consumer uncertainty. The Marshallian measure produces smaller and slightly less precise estimates. However, regardless of the surplus measure examined, welfare increased significantly with the policy changes, while revenues changed by less than 1%.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Benefit Estimation of Water Quality Improvements in Bagmati River Using Choice Modeling

Environmental Economics and Policy,

Benefit estimation of water quality improvements in the Bagmati River: Choice experiments

In this paper we estimate the benefits of improving water quality in the Bagmati River in Kathmandu using Choice Experiments. Water quality of the Bagmati has direct impact on health, environment, ecology and development of the Kathmandu valley. Only a few known studies have been conducted focusing exclusively on the benefits of improvements in quality of water in the Bagmati River. We identify and use important attributes of river water quality including cost under different management scenario to estimate willingness to pay and willingness to contribute for river water quality improvements. We also calculate compensating surplus for different level of water quality improvements

Inequality, polarization and violent conflict: the Maoist insurgency in Nepal

We empirically examine this association between inequality and conflict. The setting is the Maoist rebellion in Nepal that has claimed thousands of lives since it began in 1996. The regional variations across villages in Nepal afford a rich experiment, without having to use crosscountry data, for exploring the nature of association between conflict and inequality

The Effect of Experience and Quantity-Based Pricing on the Valuation of a Curbside Recycling Program

Quantity-based pricing for garbage collection services and recycling programs are becoming increasingly popular methods of meeting municipal solid waste diversion objectives. This article investigates household willingness to pay (WTP) for a pilot curbside recycling program (CRP) in the presence of a quantity-based pricing scheme for garbage collection services. The pilot CRP provides a unique treatment effect that more precisely determines a household\u27s level of real experience with curbside recycling than may be accomplished by respondents simply stating their experience levels. Moreover, unlike previous studies that have modeled the simultaneity of these household decisions as a two-step process, we jointly estimate the household\u27s intentions using a full-information maximum-likelihood (FIML) approach. We find that participants in the pilot CRP are more likely than non-participants to reduce their container size and that for those that intend to reduce their container size, WTP for participants is larger than for non-participants. Taken together, these results suggest that the benefits of curbside recycling may be closely linked with the availability of a quantity-based pricing scheme for garbage collection. In particular, there appears to be a virtuous cycle for the household between choosing to recycle and reducing the size of its garbage container

Environmental attitude and water treatment behavior of residents of Kathmandu Valley

This paper tries to assess a correlation between the ever increasing environmental awareness and attitude and its practical consequences in influencing the household behavior in dealing with the treatment of drinking water. The paper uses a two-equation system and the fullinformation maximum likelihood method to jointly estimate the water treatment decision equation and the environmental attitude equation. In addition, the paper looks at the role of media’s public health awareness campaign in changing the household behavior. Preliminary results indicate that the environmental attitude and the media both play an important role to affect the household\u27s decision to treat drinking water