An important question for policy is whether holding constant per capita income and other relevant factors population pressures have a significant effect upon environmental degradation. The authors examine the effect of population pressures upon deforestation in 64 developing countries in an attempt to provide relevant empirical findings. Data on deforestation were drawn from the Food and Agriculture Organizations Production Yearbook. Results suggest that a relationship exists between per capita income and deforestation and that for Africa rural population density shifts the relationship upward. The increase in the rate of deforestation levels off as income increases. The rate of growth in per capita income also has a significant negative impact upon deforestation although the magnitude of the effect is small. The authors close in stressing that reducing the rate of population growth is not necessarily the best way to reduce the rate of deforestation. Deforestation in developing countries is really a problem of market failure. Since property rights are often neither defined nor enforced there is essentially no private cost of deforestation. With no long-term stake in the land people have no incentive to use land efficiently. This situation must be addressed in conjunction with the problems of poverty and population growth.

This study examines how errors in measuring marginal attribute pric es vary with the form of the hedonic price function. In simulations, consumers with known utility functions bid for houses with given attributes. Various forms of the hedonic function are estimated using equilibrium housing prices. Errors in estimating marginal attribute prices are calculated by comparing each consumer's equilibrium marginal bid vector with the gradient of the hedonic function. When all attributes are observed, linear and quadratic Box-Cox forms produce lowest mean percentage errors; however, when some attributes are unobserved or are replaced by proxies, linear and linear Box-Cox functions perform best. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.

Maureen L. Cropper, Leland Deck, Nalin Kishor, Kenneth E. McConnell, Valuing Product Attributes Using Single Market Data: A Comparison of Hedonic and Discrete Choice Approaches, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 75, No. 2 (May, 1993), pp. 225-232

An important characteristic of many environmental programs is that their benefits extend far into the future. The primary purpose of cleanups at hazardous-waste disposal sites, for example, is often to prevent the contamination of groundwater that could pose risks to future residents at these sites. Such cleanups typically involve considerable capital and other costs, which are incurred at the front end of the project, and yield a stream of health benefits, often in the form of cancer cases avoided, that may not be recognized for many years. This would not pose unusual problems for program evaluation if everyone were comfortable with the assignment of dollar values to these reductions in future risk (see Cropper and Portney, 1990). However, regulatory agencies are sometimes reluctant to make such monetary valuations, preferring instead to evaluate programs on a cost-per-life-saved (CPLS) basis (Office of Management and Budget, 1991). This raises an interesting question. Should lives saved in the future be discounted for the purpose of calculating CPLS, or should they be counted the same as those saved tomorrow? To shed light on this, over the last year we have asked members of the public hypothetical questions that enable us to infer the rate at which they implicitly discount future lives saved (John K. Horowitz and Richard T. Carson [1990] asked similar questions of students). In the remainder of this paper, we summarize the results of this research, details of which can be found elsewhere (Cropper et al., 1991, 1992).

The federal tax code provides preferential treatment for the production and use of renewable energy. We report estimates of the subsidies' effects on greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions developed in a recent National Research Council (NRC) Report. Due to lack of estimates of the impact of tax provisions on GHG emissions, new modeling studies were commissioned. The studies found, at best, a small impact of subsidies in reducing GHG emissions; in some cases, emissions increased. The NRC report also identified the need to capture the complex interactions among subsidies, pre-existing regulations, and commodity markets.

This paper examines the EPA's decision to cancel or continue the registrations of cancer-causing pesticides that went through the special review process between 1975 and 1989. Despite claims to the contrary, our analysis indicates that the EPA indeed balanced risks against benefits in regulating pesticides: Risks to human health or the environment increased the likelihood that a particular pesticide use was canceled by the EPA; at the same time, the larger the benefits associated with a particular use, the lower was the likelihood of cancellation. Intervention by special-interest groups was also important in the regulatory process. Comments by grower organizations significantly reduced the probability of cancellation, whereas comments by environmental advocacy groups increased the probability of cancellation. Our analysis suggests that the EPA is fully capable of weighing benefits and costs when regulating environmental hazards; however, the implicit value placed on health risks--$35 million per applicator cancer case avoided--may be considered high by some persons.