Impact of Government-Sponsored Pollution Prevention Practices on Environmental Compliance and Enforcement: Evidence from a Sample of US Manufacturing Facilities

A two-way fixed effects Poisson model is used to investigate the impact of 43 EPA-sponsored pollution prevention (P2) practices on compliance and enforcement for a sample of facilities in the US manufacturing sector. I find that P2 adoption reduces environmental violations in three industries while increasing violations in two others. P2 adoption also spurs fewer enforcement actions in three industries. I further partition the P2 practices into three categories based on their approach to improve environmental performance. In doing so, I find that practices that involve changes in operating procedures--about a third of adopted P2 practices--such as instituting a self-inspection and monitoring program to discover spills or leak sources, improving maintenance scheduling and/or labeling procedures, are effective in reducing violations while practices that involve equipment or material changes are not. I also find that adopters of practices that require changes in either procedures or manufacturing equipment--about half of adopted practices--are rewarded with a more cooperative treatment of environmental infractions with fewer enforcement actions.Pollution Prevention Act, P2 practices, compliance, enforcement, Poisson models, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q53, L51, C23,

Semiparametric Estimation of Consumer Demand Systems with Micro Data

This article proposes a semiparametric two-step procedure for estimating a censored consumer demand system with micro data. The semiparametric estimator considered in the first step is suggested by Klein and Spady (1993). This estimator, used as a counterpart of the probit estimator in a conventional two-step model, does not make any distributional assumptions about the disturbances and so is exempt from model misspecification and plausible heteroscedasticity. In the second step, we motivate the choice of the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) as an economic representation of consumers' demand behavior. Implementing our proposed semiparametric two-step procedure as well as Shonkwiler and Yen (1999)'s two-step model to a household meat consumption dataset from China generates the price and expenditure elasticities of demand. We also conducted the Horrowitz and H01rdle (1994)'s specification test to our data and reject the null.censoring, semiparametric estimator, consumer demand system, food expenditures, Demand and Price Analysis,

Country of Origin Advertising and U.S. Wine Imports

The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of media advertising on the US consumption of imported wine. A panel data of seven countries and twelve years from 1994-2005 is used to estimate the demand function for US wine imports. Our empirical analysis reveals evidence of strong price and advertising effects of domestic and imported wines on imported quantities; the advertising of imported wines significantly increases the quantity of imports while the advertising of domestic wines has a strong depressing effect on imported wine volumes. Our short-run import demand price and advertising elasticity estimates are -0.406 and 0.109 for imports and 0.654 and -0.370 for domestic wines, respectively. Other determinants such as population, real income and country specific fixed effects are also found significant. Based on our model estimates, we compute the marginal return to advertising to be $2.68 on average for the six importing countries and$3.40 for the U.S.International Relations/Trade, Marketing,

Impact of Adoption of Improved Groundnut Varieties on Factor Demand and Productivity in Uganda

The study analyzed the impact of adoption of improved groundnut varieties on farm inputs demand and productivity using instrumental variables approach. The data was collected from a simple random sample of 161 groundnut farmers in Eastern Uganda. Econometric results show significant increase in expenditure on improved seed and labor among adopters relative to the non-adopters. Adoption of improved varieties significantly increased groundnuts yield, by about 1688kg per hectare. Thus, more effort is needed to increase farmers’ access to improved varieties. The Government and partners should facilitate the development of local seed multiplication systems to reduce the cost of improved seed..Production Economics, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Do Voluntary Pollution Reduction Programs (VPRs) Spur Innovation in Environmental Technology

In the context of the EPA's 33/50 program, we study whether a VPR can prompt firms to develop new environmental technologies that yield future emission reduction benefits. Because pollutant reductions generally require costly reformulations of products and/or production processes, environmental over-compliance induced by a VPR may potentially spur environmental innovation that can reduce these costs. Conversely, a VPR may induce a participating firm to divert resources from environmental research to environmental monitoring and compliance activities that yield short-term benefits in reduced emissions. We find evidence that higher rates of 33/50 program participation are associated with significant reductions in the number of successful environmental patent applications four to six years after the program ended; these results suggest a negative relationship between the 33/50 program and longer-run environmental innovation.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Climate change and household welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa: empirical evidence from Swaziland

The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and several studies suggest that climate change is expected to increase food insecurity and poverty in many parts of the world. In this paper, we adopt a microeconometric approach to empirically estimate the impact of climate change-induced hikes in cereal prices on household welfare in Swaziland (also Kingdom of Eswatini). We do so first by econometrically estimating expenditure and price elasticities of five food groups consumed by households in Swaziland using the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS), based on data from the 2009/2010 Swaziland Household Income and Expenditure Survey. Second, we use the estimated expenditure and compensated elasticities from the AIDS model, food shares from the household survey, and food price projections developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to estimate the proportionate increase in income required to maintain the level of household utility that would have prevailed absent an increase in food prices. Our results show increases in cereal prices due to climate change are expected to double extreme poverty in urban areas and increase poverty in rural areas of the country to staggering levels - between 71 and 75%, compared to 63% before the price changes. Income transfers of between 17.5 and 25.4% of pre-change expenditures are needed to avoid the welfare losses

Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers and Remittances on Credit Market Outcomes in Rural Nicaragua

The impact of public and private transfers on credit markets has not been sufficiently studied and understanding any spill over effects caused by these transfers may be useful for policy makers. This paper estimates the impact of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) and remittances received by poor households in rural Nicaragua on their decision to request a loan. We find that, on average, CCTs did not affect the request of credit while remittances increased it, controlling for potential endogeneity. We argue the reduction in income risk provided by remittances changes borrowers’ expected marginal returns to a loan and/or their creditworthiness, as perceived by lenders. The successful enforcement of the use of CCTs on long-term investments seems to have avoided externalities on the use of short-term credit these households have access to and their creditworthiness.International Development, D14, F22, O15,

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

INTRODUCTION Investment in Africa over the past year with regard to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing has led to a massive increase in the number of sequences, which, to date, exceeds 100,000 sequences generated to track the pandemic on the continent. These sequences have profoundly affected how public health officials in Africa have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. RATIONALE We demonstrate how the first 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from Africa have helped monitor the epidemic on the continent, how genomic surveillance expanded over the course of the pandemic, and how we adapted our sequencing methods to deal with an evolving virus. Finally, we also examine how viral lineages have spread across the continent in a phylogeographic framework to gain insights into the underlying temporal and spatial transmission dynamics for several variants of concern (VOCs). RESULTS Our results indicate that the number of countries in Africa that can sequence the virus within their own borders is growing and that this is coupled with a shorter turnaround time from the time of sampling to sequence submission. Ongoing evolution necessitated the continual updating of primer sets, and, as a result, eight primer sets were designed in tandem with viral evolution and used to ensure effective sequencing of the virus. The pandemic unfolded through multiple waves of infection that were each driven by distinct genetic lineages, with B.1-like ancestral strains associated with the first pandemic wave of infections in 2020. Successive waves on the continent were fueled by different VOCs, with Alpha and Beta cocirculating in distinct spatial patterns during the second wave and Delta and Omicron affecting the whole continent during the third and fourth waves, respectively. Phylogeographic reconstruction points toward distinct differences in viral importation and exportation patterns associated with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants and subvariants, when considering both Africa versus the rest of the world and viral dissemination within the continent. Our epidemiological and phylogenetic inferences therefore underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic on the continent and highlight key insights and challenges, for instance, recognizing the limitations of low testing proportions. We also highlight the early warning capacity that genomic surveillance in Africa has had for the rest of the world with the detection of new lineages and variants, the most recent being the characterization of various Omicron subvariants. CONCLUSION Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve. This is important not only to help combat SARS-CoV-2 on the continent but also because it can be used as a platform to help address the many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats in Africa. In particular, capacity building for local sequencing within countries or within the continent should be prioritized because this is generally associated with shorter turnaround times, providing the most benefit to local public health authorities tasked with pandemic response and mitigation and allowing for the fastest reaction to localized outbreaks. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century

Impact of Government-Sponsored Pollution Prevention Practices on Environmental Compliance and Enforcement: Evidence from a Sample of US Manufacturing Facilities

A two-way fixed effects Poisson model is used to investigate the impact of 43 EPA-sponsored pollution prevention (P2) practices on compliance and enforcement for a sample of facilities in the US manufacturing sector. I find that P2 adoption reduces environmental violations in three industries while increasing violations in two others. P2 adoption also spurs fewer enforcement actions in three industries. I further partition the P2 practices into three categories based on their approach to improve environmental performance. In doing so, I find that practices that involve changes in operating procedures--about a third of adopted P2 practices--such as instituting a self-inspection and monitoring program to discover spills or leak sources, improving maintenance scheduling and/or labeling procedures, are effective in reducing violations while practices that involve equipment or material changes are not. I also find that adopters of practices that require changes in either procedures or manufacturing equipment--about half of adopted practices--are rewarded with a more cooperative treatment of environmental infractions with fewer enforcement actions