Comparative costs and conservation of wild species in situ, e.g. orangutans

The extent to which conservation is feasible is constrained by budgets and the financial sacrifice stakeholders are willing to bear. Therefore a possible objective for conserving a species is to minimise the cost of achieving that stated aim. For example, if a minimum viable population (MVP) of a species is to be conserved, the size and type of habitats reserved for this could be selected to minimise cost. This requires consideration of the comparative (relative) opportunity costs of reserving different land types for conservation. A general model is developed to demonstrate this and is applied to the case of the orangutan. In the ecological literature, recommendations for reserving different types of land for conservation have been based on comparisons of either the absolute economic returns they generate if converted to commercial use or on differences in the density of a species they support. These approaches are shown to be deficient because they ignore relative trade-offs between species population and economic conversion gains at alternative sites. The proposed model is illustrated for orangutan conservation.     

Project evaluation and social‐cost benefit analysis in LDCs: Awkward issues for a useful approach∗

This paper outlines some limitations of social cost‐benefit analysis (CBA) and reviews the advocacy of its use in LDCs. It argues that account should be taken in social CBA of the optimality of imperfect decision‐making and the costs of information gathering and processing. This supports the view that simple may be optimal. It is pointed out that because of informational requirements and institutional factors, the technique may lead to bias against small projects, small countries and to urban bias. Furthermore, in the past the technique has overstressed the (economic) evaluation phase of the project cycle in comparison for instance, to the identification phase. The importance of taking account of environmental spillovers and externalities in LDCs in project evaluation has not been recognized in the past by a number of economic analysts but this is changing. Many criticisms of social CBA appear to be based upon unreasonable expectations about the perfectability of decision‐making. The technique has social value if it ensures that socially unsatisfactory projects are not selected and that those selected are satisfactory, if not optimal.     

Economics,ecology, sustainable agricultural systems and development∗

The importance of ecologically sustainable economic systems and sustainable development, including sustainable agricultural development, has been recognised internationally in the last two decades and is reflected in policy initiatives in South Africa and elsewhere. However, complex issues and tradeoffs are involved in choosing between alternative productive systems. Ecologists, economists and other resource scientists need to cooperate to specify the options more carefully. Increasing human population levels and consumption levels are now widely seen as a major threat to living resources, to their life‐support systems and to sustainable development. Possible policy implications resulting from this are explored in the World Conservation Strategy. An examination of the possible attributes of different agricultural systems and forms of land use illustrates the complexity of choosing between different productive systems and leads to the question of whether sustainability should be an absolute goal in all circumstances. The question is also taken up of whether modern agricultural systems are more sustainable or less so than traditional ones.     

The Environment and Sustainable Development in the Asia-Pacific: Views and Policies

Policies in relation to the environment and sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific need to be related to the international debate about such issues. This article surveys the literature on the environmental problems to which economic development is giving rise. Attention is paid to urbanisation, agriculture, aquaculture, mining, resource depletion, energy supplies and air quality, and to Asian policy responses to environmental change and calls for sustainable development.     

Rural Poverty and its Measurement: A Comparative Study of Villages in Nusa Penida,Bali

This paper compares the incidence of poverty in three neighbouring rural villages in Bali, two of which have experienced the innovation of seaweed-growing and have become market dependent, while the third remains a traditional cassava-corn dependent village. Several alternative measures are used to compare the incidence of poverty in the villages, and these measures are discussed critically. All of them rate the incidence of poverty in the cassava-com village to be very high, and much greater than in the seaweed-dependent villages. Aggregative or macroeconomic studies of poverty, even at the regional level, are liable to conceal or overlook such differences. An innovation, at least in the Indonesian context, is the application of subjective or respondent-dependent methods of assessing poverty. These, it is argued, can make a valuable contribution to poverty assessment and in this case their results accord most closely with those of an average per capita expenditure method based on rural Bali, the World Bank and the KFM objective methods. Economic development and growth such as has occurred in the seaweed villages has not increased the incidence of poverty; instead it appears to have reduced it, contrary to what might have been expected if Kuznets' theory or the Neo-Marxian theory were to apply.