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Abstract:
The relationship between particulate air pollution and premature death in Santiago, Chile is found to be very similar to results from industrial countries.

Heavy outdoor pollution is found in developing country cities such as Jakarta, Katowice, Mexico City, and Santiago. But most epidemiological studies of dose-response relationships between particulate air pollution (PM10) and premature deaths are from Western industrial nations. This study of such relationships in developing countries by Ostro, Sanchez, Aranda, and Eskeland fills an important gap. It is also one of the few based on monitored PM10 values, or small particles, which is likely to be a more relevant measure of exposure to air pollution than the more traditional measure of total suspended particulates.

Over several years, daily measures of ambient PM10 were collected in Santiago. Data were collected for all deaths, as well as for deaths for all men, all women, and all people over 64. Deaths from respiratory and cardiovascular disease were recorded separately, and accidental deaths were excluded.

Multiple regression analysis was used to explain mortality, with particular attention to the influence of season and temperature. The association persists after controlling for daily minimum temperature and binary variables indicating temperature extremes, the day of the week, the month, and the year. Additional sensitivity analysis suggests robust relationships.

A change equal to 10-microgram-per-cubic-meter in daily PM10 (about 9 percent) averaged over three days was associated with a 1.1 percent increase in mortality (95 percent confidence interval: 0.6 to 1.5 percent).

Death from respiratory and cardiovascular disease was more responsive to changes in PM10 than total mortality was. The same holds for mortality among men and mortality among individuals older than 64.

The results are surprisingly consistent with results from industrial countries.

This paper - a product of the Public Economics Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to analyze environmental policies. A shorter version will be published in Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Air Pollution and Health Effects in Santiago, Chile (RPO 678-48).

Abstract:
Eskeland and Harrison find almost no evidence that investors in developing countries are fleeing environmental costs at home. Instead, the evidence suggests that foreign-owned plants in four developing countries are less polluting than comparable domestic plants.

Are multinationals flocking to pollution havens in developing countries? Using data from four developing countries (Côte d`Ivoire, Mexico, Morocco, and Venezuela), Eskeland and Harrison examine the pattern of foreign investment. They find almost no evidence that foreign investors are concentrated in dirty sectors.

They also examine the behavior of multinationals doing business in these four countries, testing whether there is any tendency for foreign firms to pollute more or less than their host-country counterparts. To do this, they use consumption of energy and dirty fuels as a proxy for pollution intensity. They find that foreign plants in these four developing countries are significantly more energy-efficient and use cleaner types of energy than their domestic counterparts.

Eskeland and Harrison conclude with an analysis of U.S. outbound investment between 1982 and 1994. They reject the hypothesis that the pattern of U.S. foreign investment is skewed toward industries in which the cost of pollution abatement is high.

This paper - a product of the Public Economics Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to analyze environmental policy problems. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Pollution and the Choice of Economic Policy Instruments in Developing Countries (RPO 676-78).

Abstract:
Some corruption of employees will exist when managers are constrained in setting rewards and penalties. Attempts to reduce corruption need to address these constraints. Raising salaries without raising expected penalties will have higher costs than benefits.

In this theoretical analysis, the principal can be the head of the tax collection agency (or government or even citizens), the supervisor can be the tax collector, and the agent can be the taxpayer.

The principal, interested in controlling an agent's socially costly activity (cheating), hires the supervisor to save on monitoring costs. The agent may bribe the tax collector to suppress reporting, but bribery can be eliminated by the agency head if he institutes enough investigations and sets rewards high enough and penalties steep enough. When penalties and rewards are constrained, some corruption will exist even under a rational approach to pursuing the agency's objectives. Anticorruption efforts will have higher costs than benefits unless they successfully address these constraints.

The agency's implementation costs, and thus the scope for corruption, are defined by constraints on penalties and rewards relative to costs of monitoring and investigation. For example, if the agency head is extremely handicapped in his ability to detect bribery (by a high burden of proof and cost of investigation, and a civil service pay scale that is too flat and rigid), he cannot really reward good employees or make dishonest employees suffer.

The analysis assumes that the principal can commit in advance to a certain likelihood of being caught engaging in bribery. Creating an independent anticorruption commission (like those in Hong Kong and New South Wales) may be interpreted as a way of making such a commitment. In Hong Kong two-thirds of reports to the commission are made in full name, an indication that it has attained a reputation for independence and efficiency. The whistleblower act in the United States (promising rewards and protection for informants), as well as separation of powers and independent courts, also function as commitment.

Corruption exists not only in poorly designed but also in sophisticated systems. It can profitably be reduced only by improving general incentives. Advances in courts, investigations, freedom of the press, and flow of information can allow more performance-based rewards and penalties.

This paper - a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study accountability and the organization of government. Gunnar Eskeland may be contacted at geskeland@worldbank.org.

Abstract:
Environmental management has benefits, not just costs, and analysis can help focus efforts to get more benefits out of each dollar. Among children in Santiago, Chile, reduced concentrations of small dust particles (PM10) will reduce a range of symptoms, from coughs to bronchitis.

Ostro, Eskeland, Feyzioglu, and Sanchez estimate dose-response functions for respiratory disease among children based on data from public clinics in Santiago. They find that respiratory disease among Santiago's children is significantly affected by air pollution, measured as PM10 (small dust particles). The effect, for children under 15 (and subgroups), is robust to the inclusion of a wide range of covariates and alternative specifications.

In some model specifications, ozone, another measure of pollution, is also found to affect respiratory illness.

Internationally, effects on morbidity have typically been found in cross-section studies, or in prospective studies following a panel of predisposed children, such as asthmatics.

This study is important in finding such an effect for a larger population of children with more general characteristics-hence more useful for cost-benefit analyses of air pollution control.

The study, and a companion study of premature mortality, add to much-needed evidence on the benefits of pollution control in developing countries. The results fit well in a growing literature on dose-response functions for health effects, and so adds support to a method of transferring does response functions when local research is not available. An earlier study using this method found that modestly estimated health benefits exceeded pollution control costs in Santiago by more than 50 percent.

This paper - a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group - was initiated by operational support to an environmental study in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. The study had additional funding from the Bank`s Research Support Budget under the research project Air Pollution and Health Effects in Santiago, Chile (RPO 678-48). The authors may be contacted at geskeland@worldbank.org or tfeyzioglu@imf.org.

Abstract:
Strategies to control air pollution would be altered by redistribution objectives. In an urban program, the emphasis in the control strategy would shift toward services and goods consumed by the rich, including transport. In a program including rural areas, optimal air pollution control would be reduced because many rural households would be net losers, and they are poorer.

As is evident from public finance principles, redistribution objectives do not influence environmental policies if there are other, costless means of redistribution. How does optimal environmental protection depend on redistribution objectives?

Eskeland and Kong develop a framework that treats air quality as a pure public good, and tracks net beneficiaries as those who value air quality improvements more than their costs in a pollution control strategy.
The framework highlights the distributional characteristics of the public good and of the costs for the control strategy. One critical parameter for the distributional characteristics of the public good is the elasticity (with respect to income) of willingness to pay for environmental improvements.

Strategies to control urban air pollution would be altered by redistribution objectives-to be more aggressive in reducing emissions from luxury goods such as transport (private and general) and less aggressive for goods more heavily consumed by the poor (including several energy sources).

Some air pollution control strategies cover urban and rural areas. For those, optimal pollution control would typically be reduced by redistribution objectives, as rural households are net losers, and they are poorer.

This paper - a product of the Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study environmental problems and policies in developing countries. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Pollution and the Choice of Economic Policy Instruments in Developing Countries (RPO 676-78). Gunnar Eskeland may be contacted at geskeland@worldbank.org.

Abstract:
Low-skilled health promoters posted in rural villages are doing little to improve health or health-seeking behaviors. In a supply-driven system, such workers have too few incentives, too little knowledge, and too little supervision. Results can be improved without increasing costs. Can a supply-driven network of under-skilled rural health promoters make a difference in rural health care? There are few, if any, signs that the current rural health strategy in El Salvador is working, whether the health promoters are government employees or nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers.

Lewis, Eskeland, and Traa-Valerezo arrived at this conclusion after conducting interviews and analyzing primary and secondary data. The village-based health promoters lack incentives and supervision, and ultimately have little to offer local communities. NGO workers are more successful than government workers, but neither group performs satisfactorily.

Even the rural poor use private services quite intensively, despite the high cost of the services and of getting access to them.

Moreover, people seem to seek the services they need. They select self-treatment in 50 percent of illness episodes, with about the same success rate as when they use health providers.

Other options should be considered, as results can be improved without increasing costs.

This paper - a product of the Human Development Sector Units, Europe and Central Asia Region and Latin America and Caribbean Region; and Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to encourage appropriate policies and programs in the health sector.

Abstract:
Simple unweighted cost-effectiveness analysis remains relevant and correct when one introduces costly redistribution and revenue generation. Struck by the fact that economists did not have a plausible model for why emissions standards and mandated technologies play a dominant role in pollution control, Eskeland sought answers to two questions:

- Should one stimulate emissions reductions by firms and households, rich and poor in the same way?

- How should one combine instruments that make activities cleaner with instruments that shift the economy toward less-polluting activities?
Using clean air as an example of a pure public good, he shows the role of emissions taxes or such surrogate instruments such as emissions standards and presumptive Pigouvian taxes.

To illustrate the combination of demand management and technical controls, he computes a marginal cost curve for emissions reductions in the form of cleaner cars and fuels. And he estimates a demand model for cars and driving.

The result: under the assumption that revenue and redistributive transfers bear no premia, the cost of reducing pollution in Mexico City increases 44 percent if an emissions standards program is used and the presumptive Pigouvian tax on gasoline is not.

The important finding, as costly redistribution and revenue generation are introduced, is that this influences the general scheme of taxation (in well-known ways), and it influences the conditions for optimal environmental quality in accordance with Pigou's conjecture. However, it does not change or invalidate the rankings of technologies and interventions on the control cost curve, nor does it change the role of demand management in environmental protection.

This paper - a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to provide guiding principles in public finance and environmental protection. The author may be contacted at geskeland@worldbank.org.

Abstract:
Environmental improvements should be sought from different polluters (public or private, producer or consumer, rich or poor) at the same cost, regardless of the nature of the polluting activity. Under a plausible structure of monitoring costs, emissions standards play a central role. Eskeland brings together two of government's primary challenges: Environmental protection and taxation to generate revenues.

If negative externalities can be reduced not only by changes in consumption patterns but also by making each activity cleaner (abatement efforts), how shall inducements to various approaches be combined? If negative externalities are caused by agents as different as consumers, producers, and government, how does optimal policy combine inducements to reduce pollution?

Intuitively it seems right to tax emissions neutrally, based on marginal damages - no matter which activity pollutes or whether the polluter is rich or poor, consumer or producer, private or public. Eskeland provides a theoretical basis for such simplicity. Three assumptions are critical to his analysis:

Returns to scale do not influence the traditional problem of revenue generation.

Consumers have equal access to pollution abatement opportunities (but he also relaxes this assumption).

Planners can differentiate policy instruments (emission taxes or abatement standards) by polluting good, and by whether the polluter is a consumer, producer, or government, but they cannot differentiate such instruments (or commodity taxes) by personal characteristics or make them nonlinear in individual emissions.

Among Eskeland's findings and conclusions: Abatement efforts and consumption adjustments at all stages are optimally stimulated by a uniform emission tax levied simply where emissions occur. It simplifies things that optimal abatement is independent of whether the car is used by government, firms, or households - for weddings or for work. It also simplifies implementation that the stimulus to abatement at one stage (say, the factory) is independent of whether it yields emission reductions from the factory or from others (say, from car owners who buy the factory's products).

Finally, ministers of finance and of the environment should coordinate efforts, but they need not engage in each other's business. The minister of environment need not know which commodities are elastic in demand and thus would bear a low commodity tax. The finance minister need not know which commodities or agents pollute or who pays emission taxes.

This paper - a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to establish principles for public intervention.

Abstract:
Pigou's conjecture was that under costly taxation public expenditures should not reach the point where marginal benefits equal marginal costs. In the treatment here, public expenditures (and environmental protection) may provide public goods for consumption but also collective inputs for production. When the benefits are in production, the cost of funds is irrelevant. Why? Collective inputs benefit goods that are taxed, while for public goods the shadow price of funds reduces provision as if they were.

Assume that a public program - whether in the form of public expenditures or regulation of private activities - provides not only a public good to consumers but also a collective input (say, a less polluted water source for brewers, or better roads for their trucks).

In a context of optimal taxation and constant returns to scale, Eskeland shows that only the direct benefits to consumers in the form of a public good are adjusted by the shadow price of public revenue (typically downward, as Pigou conjectured) before benefits are aggregated to establish optimal provision. When public programs benefit productive sectors through cost savings, the marginal cost of provision is in optimum equal to the marginal cost savings in the benefiting sectors. The reason that programs that benefit production are not scaled down by the shadow price of public revenue is that the benefits are derived from markets that are otherwise taxable. Government can capture those cost savings at no distortionary cost by increasing the tax rates for each good, to match the cost savings provided.

In practice, do public programs to protect the environment benefit mostly consumers or mostly producers? Eskeland suggests that environmental protection has direct value for consumers and indirect value, as inputs, for producers. In the case of programs to reduce emissions of global greenhouse gases, for instance, most of the benefits appear to be in agriculture, a productive sector. Public programs in general provide a combination of public and private benefits: the share of commercial vehicles on roads is typically high in poor countries.

In related papers, Externalities and Production Efficiency (Policy Research Working Paper 2319) and Environmental Protection and Optimal Taxation (Policy Research Working Paper 2510), Eskeland shows that under optimal taxation, marginal abatement costs should be the same for polluting government, polluting producers, and polluting consumers, rich and poor.

This paper - a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to provide guiding principles in public finance and environmental protection. The author may be contacted at geskeland@worldbank.org.

Abstract:
In Mexico City, a ban restricting each car from driving on a specified work-day actually increased total driving and congestion. In November 1989, Mexico City's administration imposed a regulation banning each car from driving on a specific day of the week. The regulation has been both popular and controversial. Some feel that it is a reasonable concession aimed to alleviate congestion and pollution problems. Others feel it is both inefficient and unfair: Inefficient in the way most rationing systems are inefficient, and unfair in that it is costly to some and easily avoided or accommodated by others.

Some feel that it may be so inefficient that it is counterproductive. And Eskeland and Feyzioglu found evidence to support that view. Many households bought an additional car to get additional driving permits, and the amount of driving increased. Greater use of old cars and increased weekend driving may have contributed to the disappointing results of Mexico's one-day ban on driving: High welfare costs and none of the intended benefits.

This paper - a product of the Public Economics Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to analyze environmental policies and was initiated in conjunction with operational support to the Infrastructure Division, Country Department II, Latin America and the Caribbean. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Pollution and the Choice of Policy Instruments in Developing Countries (RPO 676-48).

Abstract:
Temperature influences our notion of comfort and thus the ways we equip, heat, and cool our homes in part reflect this. This paper views electricity use in part as a phenomenon of adaptation to changes in weather and provides estimates of climate change impacts on electricity consumption in Europe. Constructing a data set on weather across a panel of European countries, we employ a concept of comfort which relates electricity consumption to outdoor temperatures, to estimate the parameters of electricity demand. The results suggest that random weather variations have a statistically significant impact on residential electricity demand. With climatic changes, Northern Europeans will reduce their heating demand and Southern Europeans will increase their cooling demand. On average, the results suggest that climate change will reduce European energy demand. But the magnitude of this net benefit is small, and likely less important than other changes such as income.

Panel Data, Electricity Demand, Elasticities, Climate Change, Heating, and Cooling Degree Days, Europe

Abstract:
Is there defensive behavior to prevent diseases such as diarrhea in Jakarta? Yes. And evidence suggests that individual defensive behavior is influenced by exposure to contamination and income and education - as expected. So, given the opportunity and knowledge, individuals try to modify the effect of contamination on the incidence of diarrhea. But that incidence is also affected by the water company and its problems, factors that lie outside the realm of the household. Alberini, Eskeland, Krupnick, and McGranahan develop and estimate a model of household defensive behavior and illness. Using cross-section data from a household survey in Jakarta, they observe defensive behavior (washing hands after using the toilet) consistent with expectations: Defensive effort intensifies with exposure to contamination, and with income and education. Variables associated with the cost of defensive behavior - such as interruptions in the water supply - reduce defensive behavior. The data suggest that wealthier households are no less vulnerable to illness. The water sources that supply the wealthy (the water company and private wells) are disrupted more often, interfering with their defensive behavior. There is also evidence, although weak, to support findings by van der Slice and Briscoe (1993): that pathogens originating within a household are less harmful to household members than are pathogens originating from other households. Given the opportunity and knowledge, individuals try to modify the effect of contamination on the incidence of diarrhea. But diarrhea`s incidence is also affected by decisions and problems outside the realm of the household, including the performance of the water company. This paper - a product of the Public Economics Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to analyze pollution control in developing countries. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Pollution and the Choice of Policy Instruments in Developing Countries (RPO 676-48).

Abstract:
School autonomy and parental participation both influence learning. Autonomy raises the rent available at the school and participation determines whether student learning will benefit from that rent. It is therefore important who is empowered through decentralization. According to a theoretical model, school autonomy and parental participation in schools can increase student learning through separate channels. Greater school autonomy increases the rent that can be distributed among stakeholders in the school, while institutions for parental participation (such as a school board) empower parents to command a larger share of this surplus - for example, through student learning.

Using a rich cross-sectional data set from Argentine schools (sixth and seventh grades), Eskeland and Filmer find that autonomy and participation raise student test scores for a given level of inputs in a multiplicative way, consistent with the model. Autonomy has a direct effect on learning (but not for very low levels of participation), while participation affects learning only through the mediation of the effect of autonomy. The results are robust to a variety of robustness checks and for subsamples of children from poor households, children of uneducated mothers, schools with low mean family wealth, and public schools.

It is possible that autonomy and participation are endogenously determined and that this biases the results - the data available do not allow this to be ruled out with certainty. Plausible predictors of autonomy and participation are also plausible predictors of test scores, and they fail tests for the overidentifying restrictions. Heuristically argued, however, the potential for correlation with unobserved variables may be limited: The data set is rich in observed variables, and autonomy and participation show very low correlation with observed variables. Subject to these caveats, the results may be relevant to decentralization in two ways. First, as decentralization moves responsibility from the central toward the provincial or local government, the results should be directly relevant if the decentralization increases autonomy and participation in schools. Second, if the results are interpreted as representing a more general effect of moving decisionmaking toward users and the local community, the results are relevant even if little happens to autonomy and participation in schools. More important, perhaps, the authors illustrate empirically the importance of knowing who is empowered when higher levels of government loosen control.

This paper - a product of Public Services, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to improve understanding of the determinants of the quality of educational services.

Abstract:
The study finds that households' choice of travel modes in Sao Paulo is not very sensitive to pricing. So, subsidies to less polluting modes can hardly be justified on the basis that they would attract traffic from more polluting modes. Several caveats apply.

How would travel demand in Sao Paulo respond to demand management instruments? Could higher gasoline prices or lower metro fares (or changes in travel time) help reduce congestion or pollution? Swait and Eskeland use cross-sectional variation from an urban travel survey to study the substitutability in demand between travel modes. The method assumes that the set of trips is given (that is, origin-destination pairs do not change). Choice of mode was found to be quite insensitive to changes: All elasticities were lower than 0.5 in absolute value, and most were close to zero.

While the sensitivity of mode choice to relative travel times (that is, speeds) was somewhat greater than that to costs, the general finding is that mode choice is quite inflexible. So, subsidies to less polluting (less congesting) travel modes would not help much in attracting travelers from more polluting (more congesting) modes. (The same holds for subsidized means of making them run faster.) But there are important limitations in the scope of the study. First, the study does not discuss optimal pricing. It merely examines the likely sign and magnitude of the links between pollution and policy parameters such as prices and travel speeds. Second, aggregate demand by mode could also depend on the city's shape and its travel intensity (the number, direction, and length of trips). For example, if a city stretches along a constructed metro line, the study would not capture such a phenomenon, since sensitive trip generation is excluded. These issues are not examined in the study.

This paper - a product of the Public Economics Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to study the use of fiscal instruments in environmental protection. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Pollution and the Choice of Economic Policy Instruments in Developing Countries (RPO 676-48).

Abstract:
Locally motivated air quality programs have only minor collateral benefits for the global climate. If agencies with global and local agendas did business together, then individuals and firms - and even cities - would act globally when thinking locally, and one would see greater synergy.

Eskeland and Xie find that locally motivated air quality programs for urban transport have limited collateral benefits in terms of protecting the global climate. This could puzzle some, since these two public goods - one global, one local - seem to be jointly produced. However, air quality in Mexico City, Santiago, and elsewhere is predominantly pursued by technical improvements (making cars and fuels cleaner), and not by reducing demand for polluting goods and services (though in Europe high fuel taxes help reduce demand).

Control programs developed under joint stimulus to protect the global and local environment have not yet been seen, and they may surprise us when they come. However, they will likely rely more on reducing demand, using instruments such as corrective (Pigovian) taxes on fuels. The authors show how, if locally and globally charged agencies can do business together, consumers, producers, and cities will act globally when thinking locally. Only then will we know the extent to which local and global benefits are produced jointly.

This paper - a joint product of Public Economics, Development Research Group, and the Global Environment Unit, Environment Department - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to analyze environmental problems and policies in developing countries. The authors may be contacted at geskeland@worldbank.org or jxie@worldbank.org.

Abstract:
Permits markets are celebrated as a political instrument since they allow (i) firms to equalize marginal costs through trade and (ii) the regulator to distribute the burden in a politically desirable way. These two concerns, however, may conflict in a dynamic setting. Anticipating the regulator's future desire to give more permits to firms that need them, the firms purchase permits to signal their need. This raises the price above marginal costs and the market becomes inefficient. If the social cost of pollution is high and the government intervenes frequently in the market, the distortions are greater than the gains from trade and non-tradable permits are better. The analysis helps to understand permit markets and how they should be designed.

Tradable permits, time inconsistency, plan vs. market

Abstract:
There is a debate among policy analysts about whether fuel taxes alone are the most effective policy to reduce fuel use by motorists, or whether to also use mandatory standards for fuel efficiency. A problem with a policy mandating fuel economy standards is the "rebound effect," whereby owners with more efficient vehicles increase vehicle usage. If an important part of negative externalities from transport are associated with vehicle kilometers (accidents, congestion, road wear) rather than fuel consumption, the rebound effect increases negative externalities. Taxes and standards should be mutually supportive because fuel taxes often meet political resistance. Over time, fuel efficiency standards can reduce political resistance to fuel taxes. Thus, by raising fuel efficiency standards now, politicians may be able to pursue higher fuel tax paths in the future. Another argument in support of fuel efficiency standards and similar policies is that standards to a greater extent than taxes can be announced in advance and still be credible and change the behavior of inventors, firms, and other agents in society. A further argument is that standards can be used with greater force and commitment through international coordination.

Transport Economics Policy & Planning, Transport and Environment, Environmental Economics & Policies, Energy Production and Transportation, Oil Refining & Gas Industry

Abstract:
Primary health care is accepted as the model for delivering basic health care to low income populations in developing countries. Using El Salvador as a case study, the paper draws on three data sets and a qualitative survey to assess health care access and utilization across public and private sector options (including NGOs). Multivariate analysis is used to estimate the quantitative determinants of health seeking behavior. Physical and financial access is generally good. Households do not value the community health workers, and prefer high cost private care, even the poorest families, because of the lower waiting times and higher probability of successful treatment. Similarly, higher level public facilities—health centers and hospitals—are preferred because they are less costly in terms of time as they offer "one stop shopping" and do not require multiple visits, and treatment success is higher than among health posts, health units or community health workers. These results combined with the small size of El Salvador suggest that alternative strategies to community health workers may be a more cost effective approach. While prevention is desirable, community health workers do not have the skills or services that the communities value, which makes them less effective in promoting prevention. Alternative modes of reaching the community could reduce costs and raise the effectiveness of public health spending.

Abstract:
This paper presents evidence on whether multinationals are flocking to developing country 'pollution havens'. Although we find some evidence that foreign investors locate in sectors with high levels of air pollution, the evidence is weak at best. We then examine whether foreign firms pollute less than their peers. We find that foreign plants are significantly more energy efficient and use cleaner types of energy. We conclude with an analysis of US outbound investment. Although the pattern of US foreign investment is skewed towards industries with high costs of pollution abatement, the results are not robust across specifications.

Abstract:
In a congested city with air pollution like Bangkok, there are gains to analyzing and addressing them in coordination. Higher speed, tremendously valuable in itself for firms and households, also reduce the costs of air quality improvements.

Abstract:
For some time now, CEPS has participated in a project funded by the European Commission called 'Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies: Supporting European Climate Policy' (ADAM). One research stream within the ADAM project focuses on the implications of mitigation and adaptation strategies for the electricity sector. Apart from mitigation of climate change, the electricity sector will also need to adapt to global warming. A warmer world requires less heating and more cooling. It also changes river flows and the frequency of extreme weather events, as well as the ability to generate electricity and to deliver it without disruptions. The ADAM project therefore also explores the links and feedbacks between adaptation and mitigation.

This ADAM-CEPS policy brief elaborates on these issues from a research perspective, but in a policy-relevant way. Section 1 describes the impacts of a warming world on the electricity system with regards to electricity demand and supply, and elaborates on the necessary adaptation strategies. Section 2 analyses policy instruments in support of the necessary transition, and explores biases as regards political feasibility. Section 3 analyses technologies and technological change, both for short-term emission reductions until 2020 and with a longer-term view on a low carbon electricity system in Europe. Finally, section 4 deals with opportunities and challenges of different policies for the European electricity sector in a global context.

Climate Change, International Climate Change Regime

Abstract:
Locally motivated air quality programs in Santiago and Mexico City have only minor collateral benefits for the global climate. If agencies with global and local agendas did business together, then individuals and firms and even cities would act globally when thinking locally, and one would see greater synergy. Eskeland and Xie find that locally motivated air quality programs for urban transport have limited collateral benefits in terms of protecting the global climate. This could puzzle some, since these two public goods one global, one local seem to be jointly produced. However, air quality in Mexico City, Santiago, and elsewhere is predominantly pursued by technical improvements (making cars and fuels cleaner), and not by reducing demand for polluting goods and services (though in Europe high fuel taxes help reduce demand). Control programs developed under joint stimulus to protect the global and local environment have not yet been seen, and they may surprise us when they come. However, they will likely rely more on reducing demand, using instruments such as corrective (Pigovian) taxes on fuels. The authors show how, if locally and globally charged agencies can do business together, consumers, producers, and cities will act globally when thinking locally. Only then will we know the extent to which local and global benefits are produced jointly.