In this review, we attempt to describe the evolution of integrated assessment modeling research since the pioneering work of William Nordhaus in 1994, highlighting a number of challenges and sugges...

The aim of this article is to review a number of issues related to uncertain population forecasts, with a focus on world population. Why are these forecasts uncertain? Population forecasters tradit...

This review covers a nascent literature that experiments with survey design to measure whether the way in which we collect socio-economic data in developing countries influences the data and affects the results of subsequent analyses. We start by showing that survey methods matter and the size of the effects can be nothing short of staggering, affecting basic stylized facts of development (such as

Despite the significant risks and uncertainties that farmers in developing and emerging countries face in their production process, efforts at encouraging them to adopt agricultural insurance to mi...

In urban areas around the world, increasing motorization and growing travel demand make the urban transportation sector an ever-greater contributor to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissio...

From the perspective of sending countries, international migrants are positively selected in terms of schooling, particularly in low-income countries. While emigration affects human capital accumul...

Despite growing policy commitment and decades of extensive research, nutritional deficiencies remain a key challenge for health systems worldwide. In addition to causing significant personal costs ...

Rising global demand for vegetable oil during the last few decades has led to a drastic increase in the land area under oil palm. Especially in Southeast Asia, the oil palm boom has contributed to ...

The financial system could help achieve the global climate targets by aligning investments to sustainability. However, investors are largely exposed to carbon-intensive assets that could become str...

Assets in the fossil fuel industries are at risk of losing market value due to anticipated breakthroughs in renewable technology and governments stepping up climate policies in the light of the Paris commitments to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Stranded assets arise due to uncertainty about the future timing of these two types of events and substantial intertemporal and intersectoral

Spillovers among jurisdictions are ubiquitous and likely to increase with increasing population and consumption, so the centralization or decentralization of environmental governance is of pressing...

Cost-benefit analyses have largely failed to demonstrate a positive benefit to cost ratio for programs designed to improve and protect water quality in the United States and European Union. At the ...

We develop a theory of change for payments for environmental services (PES) to review their imminent strengths and weaknesses in light of a growing body of impact evaluation studies. We show that P...

The theoretical literature analyzing eco-label programs has focused mainly on how intricate interactions between firms, eco-label certifiers, and regulators shape these programs’ economic and envir...

The past decades have seen the development of a multitude of sustainability-related food labels aimed at reducing the existing information asymmetry between food practitioners and consumers regardi...

Much of neoclassical economics is concerned with prices—more specifically, with relative prices. Similarly, economists have studied behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty for at least a centu...

The merger of Dow and DuPont, the acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina, and the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer have recently reshaped the global seed and biotech industry and caused concern about...

We appraise the current status of relational contract theory, along with associated empirical studies, with the goal of providing an orientation to the field to economists who may not have expertis...

Studies examining pricing outcomes in the food retail industry are complicated both by the multiproduct nature of transactions and by the presence of highly concentrated food processing and retaili...

The food-energy-water (FEW) nexus is facing grand challenges in meeting increasing demand resulting from global changes in climate, economy, and population. Emerging technologies are expected to pl...

The world's forests provide valuable contributions to people but continue to be threatened by agricultural expansion and other land uses. Counterfactual-based methods are increasingly used to evalu...

Forests have become an important carbon sink in the last century, with management and carbon fertilization offsetting nearly all of the carbon emitted due to deforestation and conversion of land in...

The Annual Review of Resource Economics presents Professor Sir Angus Deaton in conversation with economist Dr. Gordon Rausser. Dr. Deaton is Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of...

Fertilizer and other input subsidies have been prominent components of agricultural policies in many Asian and African countries since the 1960s. Their economic and political rationale is scrutiniz...

International agricultural research is often motivated by the potential benefits it could bring to smallholder farmers in developing countries. A recent experimental literature has emerged on why i...

Despite the fact that migration out of agriculture has always been a part of the economic development process, policy makers have long feared that migration from rural areas reduces agricultural pr...

Most of the world's displaced people are hosted in low-income countries. Focusing on evidence from poor countries, we review the literature on the economic consequences of hosting refugees or inter...

Urbanization is taking place at an unprecedented pace and scale in China, India, and many other emerging economies. This will have profound impacts on the world economy and environment. This review...

Natural disaster losses have been increasing worldwide. Insurance is thought to play a critical role in improving resilience to these events by both promoting recovery and providing incentives for ...

The environmental justice literature has found that the poor and people of color are disproportionately exposed to pollution. This literature has sparked a broad activist movement and several polic...

Biodiversity is declining worldwide, and the costs of biodiversity losses are increasingly being recognized by economists. In this article, we first review the multiple meanings of biodiversity, mo...

We highlight the extraordinary growth in private conservation via land trusts and conservation easements and describe the problems arising from the interplay of public finance and private decisions...

Precision farming enables agricultural management decisions to be tailored spatially and temporally. Site-specific sensing, sampling, and managing allow farmers to treat a field as a heterogeneous ...

Mastitis is the most important production disease in dairy farming, leading to considerable inefficiency in production. In 1992, an important paper describing a simple but very useful economic fram...

This review focuses on the health and nutrition impacts of food assistance programs. We focus particular attention on the United States, both because of the plethora of types of programs and associ...

The economics of human nutrition has changed greatly in recent years as researchers have moved beyond supply and demand of specific foods and total calories to functional aspects of diet quality, s...

Challenges to the conventional paradigm have isolated industrial agriculture from consumer segments exhibiting preferences for a growing array of credence attributes, including organic, locally pro...

We review the fuel-food price linkage model—time-series, structural, and general or partial equilibrium models, with most attention devoted to the time-series literature. Our assessment is nested i...

Wood-based bioenergy development could play a vital role in attaining energy independence, reducing carbon emissions, and ensuring rural prosperity in the United States. An understanding of policie...

Since 2007, large and unexpected declines in generation costs for renewable energy systems, particularly solar but also wind, combined with policy measures designed to limit greenhouse gas emission...

Hydrological investments, particularly irrigation dams, have multiple potential benefits for economic development. Dams also have financial, environmental, and distributional impacts that can affec...

Since the Blue Revolution began in the late 1960s, global aquaculture production has grown rapidly. Aquaculture now accounts for over half of the world's fish for direct human consumption and is ex...

This review evaluates the use of spatial models for the analysis of policy making. First, we examine spatial theory and its applications in a variety of institutional settings. We discuss how the p...

Computational methods are required to solve problems without closed-form solutions in environmental and resource economics. Efficiency, stability, and accuracy are key elements for computational me...

The literature on real options shows that irreversibilities, uncertainties about future benefits and costs, and the flexibility in decision making generate benefits and costs of delaying immediate ...

Traditional top-down methods for resource management ask first what future conditions will be, then identify the best action(s) to take in response to that prediction. Even when acknowledging uncer...

This article presents an interview with environmental economist Maureen L. Cropper. Maureen completed her Ph.D. at Cornell University and subsequently held positions at the University of California...

We review recent water reforms and the consequences of water recovery intended to increase stream flows in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), Australia. The MDB provides a natural experiment of water recovery for the environment that includes (a) the voluntary buy-back of water rights from willing sellers and (b) the subsidization of irrigation infrastructure. We find that (a) the actual increase in the

Social norms affect environmental quality. But what exactly is a social norm? Environmental economists studying the topic draw on diverse scholarly traditions and may not have the same phenomenon in mind when using the concept. For example, social norms may refer to common, but not necessarily socially approved, behaviors; to internalized ethical rules; or to one of several equilibria in a coordination

Fishery rents may be dissipated across margins not well defined or controlled by an individual transferable quota system. Collective rights–based fishery management (CRBFM), where catch rights are held by a group, can sometimes generate greater benefits and can also address external impacts of the fishery. I discuss potential failures of individual quotas and how these problems were addressed by CRBFM

Agriculture stands on the cusp of a digital revolution, and the same technologies that created the Internet and are transforming medicine are now being applied in our farms and on our fields. Overall, this digital agricultural revolution is being driven by the low cost of collecting data on everything from soil conditions to animal health and crop development along with weather station data and data

A quarter of all species around the globe are threatened with extinction; this article reviews research in economics on how best to counter those threats. Normative research has developed useful tools for cost-effectively choosing areas of habitat to protect. Such work has also designed working-lands contracts that can induce efficient quantities and patterns of conservation on private lands. Positive

Organic agriculture is often perceived as more sustainable than conventional farming. We review the literature on this topic from a global perspective. In terms of environmental and climate change effects, organic farming is less polluting than conventional farming when measured per unit of land but not when measured per unit of output. Organic farming, which currently accounts for only 1% of global

The world's agrifood systems have been transformed by a process of globalization in which ever-closer functional integration of the world's economies has occurred, supported by the Internet, the rise of transnational corporations, and the removal of many barriers to trade and investment. This review outlines the key characteristics of globalization and then details the changes occurring to agriculture

International cooperation to address the threat of climate change has become more institutionally diverse over the past decade, reflecting multiple scales of governance and the growing inclusion of climate change issues in other policy arenas. Cooperation under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has continued to evolve from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the 2015 Paris Agreement

The demand for quantitative assessments of the impacts of food and agricultural policies has grown steadily in the past four decades. From the application of social cost-benefit analysis to investments in developing countries in the 1970s to the use of increasingly sophisticated general equilibrium models today, the menu of available techniques for policy assessment has expanded rapidly. In addition

There has been increasing interest in food characteristics that are broadly classified here as socially acceptable credence attributes. This review considers several demand-side issues associated with the economic analysis of these attributes. First, despite ample research and media discussion suggesting strong preference for these food attributes, market shares remain low. Hypothetical bias and social

Despite substantial progress, gender gaps persist in many developing countries. Since the 1990s, a literature has emerged arguing that these gaps are not only inequitable, but also reduce economic performance. This review finds that, first, it is methodologically difficult to determine reliable effects of gender gaps on economic performance. Second, accounting studies that calculate how much larger

The post-Second World War liberal trade order has been a driver of global economic growth and rising average per capita incomes. This order confronts increasing opposition, reflecting concerns about adjustment costs and distributional effects of globalization and the ability to pursue national policy goals. At the same time, the development of complex production relations distributed across many countries

Foodborne illnesses are an important health issue throughout the world. Food safety incidents cause significant economic losses in a multitude of ways, including discomfort, pain, loss in productivity, and death. This review examines issues in the economics of food safety. We first discuss the analysis of costs and benefits of food safety intervention and their usefulness in guiding policy making,