Labor force growth and the environment in Costa Rica

The introduction to this report of a study that examines the potential environmental impacts of labor force growth (LFG) in Costa Rica under LFG scenarios notes that LFG is an economically critical aspect of population growth that can affect the environment by expanding the economy's production possibilities frontier and/or by increasing consumption. The introduction also explains why Costa Rica is ideal for this study and identifies the study as unique because it constructs a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model using 10 environmental indicators and because it models uncertainty regarding the values of the economic parameters. The report continues by reviewing the literature linking population and environmental issues; detailing the CGE model; discussing the 10 environmental indicators (deforestation, erosion, pesticide use, overfishing, hazardous wastes, inorganic wastes, organic wastes, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and water/sewer usage) used in the model; and explaining the method used to simulate the impacts of LFG. The major conclusions that emerged from the results of this study are that 1) the economy-wide impacts of LFG (and, thus, population growth) on the environment are important and vary significantly according to the amounts of physical and human capital present in the labor force and 2) the impacts of LFG vary substantially among environmental indicators.