Environmental regulation and development : a cross-country empirical analysis

The authors develop comparative indices of environmental policy and performance for 31 countries using a quantified analysis of reports prepared for the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development. In cross-country regressions, they find a very strong, continuous association between their indicators and national income per capita, particularly when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Their results suggest a characteristic progression in development. Poor agrarian economies focus first on natural resource protection. With increased urbanization and industrialization, countries move from initial regulation of water pollution to air pollution control. The authors highlight the importance of institutional development. Environmental regulation is more advanced in developing countries with relatively secure property rights, effective legal and judicial systems, and efficient public administration.Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Agricultural Research,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Agricultural Research,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Governance

Financial Numeric Extreme Labelling: A Dataset and Benchmarking for XBRL Tagging

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandates all public companies to file periodic financial statements that should contain numerals annotated with a particular label from a taxonomy. In this paper, we formulate the task of automating the assignment of a label to a particular numeral span in a sentence from an extremely large label set. Towards this task, we release a dataset, Financial Numeric Extreme Labelling (FNXL), annotated with 2,794 labels. We benchmark the performance of the FNXL dataset by formulating the task as (a) a sequence labelling problem and (b) a pipeline with span extraction followed by Extreme Classification. Although the two approaches perform comparably, the pipeline solution provides a slight edge for the least frequent labels.Comment: Accepted to ACL'23 Findings Pape

India - Vulnerability of Kolkata metropolitan area to increased precipitation in a changing climate

This study aims to strengthen the understanding of the vulnerability of Kolkata from increased precipitation caused by climate change effects with a specific goal to: compile a data base with past weather related information and damage caused by extreme weather related episodes; develop hydrological, hydraulic, and storm drainage models to identify vulnerable areas and determine physical damage estimates resulting from climate change effects; assess monetary, social, and environmental impacts resulting from such climate change events; and strengthen local capabilities so that the planning process for Kolkata can account for climate related damage effects in future while analyzing all new projects. In this study, precipitation events in Kolkata based on available historical rainfall data for 25 years has been considered as a baseline (without climate change) scenario. The study modeled the impact of climate change on increased flooding in Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA). The main causes of flooding in KMA are intense precipitation, overtopping of the Hooghly River due to water inflow from local precipitation as well as that from the catchment area, and storm surge effects. Land subsidence was not included in the study as it was felt to be a localized problem in only a few pockets

Environmental Regulation and Development: A Cross-country Empirical Analysis

This paper develops comparative indices of environmental policy and performance for 31 countries, using a quantified analysis of reports prepared for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). In cross-country regressions, we find a very strong, positive association between our indicators and the level of economic development, particularly when the latter is adjusted for purchasing power parity. Our results suggest a characteristic progression in the development process, from protection of natural resources to regulation of water pollution and, finally, air pollution control. They also highlight the importance of institutional development, with significant roles for degree of private property protection, effectiveness of the legal/judicial system and efficiency of public administration. Controlling for these variables, "Green" sector indices should be positively correlated with: (1) rural population density; and (2) agricultural and forest production share of national output. "Brown" sector indices should be positively correlated with: (1) particular focus on public health, indexed by life expectancy; (2) urban share of total population; (3) urban population density; and (4) manufacturing share of national output. Our analysis of overall regulatory performance reveals strong cross-country associations with income per capita, security of property rights, and general development of the legal and regulatory system. Surprisingly, however, we find only insignificant or perverse associations with degree of popular representation and freedom of information. For both the Green and Brown indices, performance is again strongly associated with income per capita, freedom of property and (in small samples) measures of regulatory efficiency. The two specifically rural sector variables (population density; proportion of GDP in agriculture and forestry) are only weakly associated with the Green index. The fit is much better for the Brown index: degree of urbanization, population density and manufacturing share in GDP all have the expected signs and relatively high significance. Life expectancy as a proxy for public health priority has no independent effect. In summary, our findings suggest that a detailed, quantified analysis of the UNCED reports can yield comparable and plausible indices of environmental policy performance across countries. Cross-country variations in our environmental index are explained well by variations in income per capita, degree of urbanization and industrialization, security of property rights and general administrative efficiency.