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We examine the implicit price of job mortality rates, climate, and air pollution in Taiwan under the hedonic wage frame with panel data from 1999 to 2014. We adopt a fixed-effects model to control for the omitted year-specific factors and time-invariant individual, industry, and city factors that may affect the wage. The within-individual variations in climate and air pollution from workers who have changed their job locations make it possible to identify the impacts of climate and air pollution on wages. We find that workers in Taiwan are willing to pay 308 USD (in 2014 value terms) for the January temperature to increase by 1∘C,781 USD for the July temperature to decline by 1∘C, indicating a net loss from global warming. Besides, the implicit price of air quality is 45 USD for PM 10 concentrations to fall by 1 unit ([Formula: see text]), and the implicit price of job risks is 140 USD per unit (1/100,000).

Small-scale fishers’ short-run supply decisions are understudied, often because of data limitations. We utilize a unique dataset of daily catches and prices from a mixed-species trawl fishery in Taiwan, characterized by targeting decisions made before prices are formed. To investigate the effect of expected prices on fishers’ supply decisions, we formulate a vector error correction model in a seemingly unrelated regression system of 11 fish species. We find a price-elastic short-run supply for several species: the maximum daily price elasticity of supply (PES) ranges from 0.4 to 1.1 and is statistically significant for all but one species. The long-run PES (approx. weekly) is >1 for eight species. In contrast, elasticity with respect to wave height is weak (the median short-run elasticity is −0.4). These findings are unexpected for trawl fisheries, which are believed to have low selectivity. Our results highlight the potential that auction markets have to incentivize fishing that emphasizes quality over quantity. acceptedVersion

While combating air pollution may seem to be a corporate responsibility, what individuals contribute can be substantial. This study explores the individual's behavioral intention to reduce the air pollution associated with vehicles, household appliances, and religious practices. An extended theory of planned behavior (TPB), past behavior included, serves as the analytical model, while the approach of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is employed in the model's estimation. The results show that subjective norms represent the primary driver of individual intentions to reduce air pollution, followed by perceived behavioral control, past behavior, and attitude, in that order. Surprisingly, advocacy on the part of the government to reduce the burning of incense and joss paper, disregarding years of social conflicts and protests, plays the most important role among all indicators within the construct subjective norms. This result holds even within the subsample of believers in religions that involve the practice of burning incense and joss paper.

During the last two decades, economic studies on happiness have grown rapidly in particular, studies on the effect of income on happiness. Ng (Pac Econ Rev 7(1):51–63, 2002) has highlighted the East-Asian happiness gap. The East Asian countries, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore, are performing well economically, however, performing poorly in happiness. Societal values have been suggested to be the potential explanation of this happiness gap. Nevertheless, the effects of societal values on happiness are yet to be explored fully. This paper aims to estimate the effect of income on happiness and examine the moderating effect of societal values in the context of the East-Asian happiness gap using the World Values Survey (WVS) data. The WVS (waves 6, 2010–2014) consists of nationally representative sample of 14,447 respondents from the various East and South Asian countries. It provides measurements of societal values, subjective well-being and other socio-demographic variables including income. We found that the effect of income on happiness is the lowest (and insignificant) in Thailand and Philippines; and the highest (and strongly significant) in South Korea and Taiwan. The effect of income becomes insignificant once it is moderated by the societal values. Societal values matter to explain the East-Asian happiness gap and might refute the relevance of Easterlin paradox.

We measure the amenity values of climate and air quality in Taiwan using the two-step hedonic price method (HPM). Separate hedonic housing price equations, one for each of three metropolitan areas that represent respective housing markets in Northern, Central, and Southern Taiwan, are estimated. We find evidence of a significant impact of climate and air quality on housing prices. As expected, residents in Taiwan prefer a warmer winter, cooler summer, lower humidity, and better air quality. Based on the results of the housing price regression, we compute implicit prices for environmental amenities, and then pool observations from all three metropolitan areas to estimate the demand for environmental amenities. The estimated demand functions for environmental amenities are used to evaluate the benefits and losses from changes in climate and air quality in Taiwan. Our results show that, compared to the benefits of a higher temperature in January, the losses from the rise in temperature in July are much higher in such a way that global warming is resulting in significant net losses in Taiwan. The area-specific welfare analysis in this study will help in informing climate change policy formulation and decision-making in Taiwan.

We examine the concept of spatial optimism, defined as the tendency for individuals to perceive climate change as less threatening to themselves than to people in geographically more distant locations. Existing studies find mixed evidence of this phenomenon, while the methods employed often fail to rule out confounding factors. To resolve these empirical and methodological tensions, we present results from a survey experiment fielded in nine countries spanning Europe, North America, and Asia. The survey finds that respondents systematically perceive climate change as a greater threat to the world than to themselves, in nine countries. However, while groups that may be considered more vulnerable to climate change often display higher levels of perceived overall risk, the survey finds evidence of spatial bias to be systematic across and within cases. Future research should apply this measurement strategy in more vulnerable countries and over time. acceptedVersion

We estimate the distributional effects of freedom and income on happiness for East Asian Chinese societies through an ordinal parametric quantile regression approach. The results show that freedom and income exhibit positive and significant effects across societies and happiness levels. The freedom effects generally become larger for those at higher happiness quantiles. However, the income effects decline as the quantile level increases. Thus, one may have a trade-off between freedom and income without compromising individual happiness. The trade-off of freedom (income) for income (freedom) is more pronounced for people at a lower (higher) happiness level.

The E3ME-FTT model is applied to assess the impacts of alternative climate club structures. We consider two kinds of climate club memberships: the World Climate Club (WCC), where every country in the world joins the club, and the Core Climate Club (CCC), with seven likely club members: EU[Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text]5, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia. First, we find that both the WCC and domestic revenue-neutral recycling matter a lot. The global CO2 emissions in 2050 could be reduced by 50% from BAU under the WCC. With domestic revenue-neutral recycling, there will be large positive impacts on GDP under both the WCC and the CCC. Secondly, the negative effects of trade sanctions on cumulative global GDP and global CO2 emissions make it unwelcome to be used as part of the club design. Lastly, the introduction of international transfers will result in a win–win solution that will not only increase the cumulative global GDP and reduce global CO2 emissions but also enhance the equality among club members and induce more likely participation in the climate club.

We examine the revealed preference theory underlying the welfare analysis of public goods (e.g., environmental quality) by observing the consumption of related commodities. Inspired by Larson (1991) and Ebert (1998), and extended from Eom and Larson (2006), an empirical strategy is formulated, consistent with the theory of uniquely deriving use and nonuse values for a change in the public good. We show that the weak complementarity assumption and the Willig condition, the common preference assumptions used to support the revealed preference methods for non-market valuation, may be tested as parameter restrictions. A study of water quality valuation is presented to illustrate the proposed empirical strategy. Results show that the weak complementarity assumption and the Willig condition generally do not hold in the case study, and the consumer surplus derived from the indirect valuation method deviates largely from the exact welfare measures.

Rivers flow downstream and unidirectionally. However, this fact has not yet been utilized in the institutional design for water trading. By utilizing this characteristic, we first designed a water trading system of “locational water rights.” This new system is able to mitigate the return flow-related and instream flow-related third-party effects of volumetric reliability from water transfers. We provided mathematical proof of its economic efficiency. We then applied this water trading system to the case of the Choushui River basin in Taiwan. In this area, agriculture is highly developed while domestic and industrial water demands have increased rapidly. Using an agent-based model simulation, we estimated the potential economic benefits of implementing the system of locational water rights in the Choushui River basin.

The direct damage caused by earthquakes, such as impaired buildings, may interfere with normal business operations and disrupt the function of the industrial chain. Such economic impacts can be evaluated using the input–output analysis developed by Leontief. In this paper, two scenario earthquakes in northern Taiwan both with a return period of 475 years—the Hsinchu Hsincheng and the Yilan Nan-ao earthquakes—are simulated. The results show that the economic impact caused by the Hsincheng earthquake is greater than that resulting from the Nan-ao earthquake, which should be the major scenario considered for the disaster reduction plan. The industries affected the most are the manufacturing, food services and entertainment, storage and retail trade, and public and construction industries. The Nan-ao earthquake causes relatively more losses in the food services and entertainment industries. Most of the repercussion effects of these industries are in the central and southern parts of Taiwan. The loss to the manufacturing sector and its repercussion effects are enormous. Therefore, the government should make it a first priority to encourage the manufacturing sector to implement earthquake mitigations, such as a seismic retrofit, or to provide a seismic evaluation, which can enable firms to engage in mitigation voluntarily. The measure needed to reduce the loss in agriculture is that the government can purchase agricultural products in central and southern Taiwan following the disaster and offer them to survivors in northern Taiwan.

To be a viable alternative, a biofuel should provide a net energy gain and be capable of being produced in large quantities without reducing food supplies. Amounts of agricultural waste are produced and require treatment, with rice straw contributing the greatest source of such potential bio-fuel in Taiwan. Through life-cycle accounting, several energy indicators and four potential gasification technologies (PGT) were evaluated. The input energy steps for the energy life cycle assessment (ELCA) include collection, generator, torrefaction, crushing, briquetting, transportation, energy production, condensation, air pollution control and distribution of biofuels to the point of end use. Every PGT has a positive energy benefit. The input of energy required for the transportation and pre-treatment are major steps in the ELCA. On-site briquetting of refused-derived fuel (RDF) provides an alternative means of reducing transportation energy requirements. Bio-energy sources, such as waste rice straw, provide an ideal material for the bio-fuel plant.

In contrast to the previous literature, this paper examines the optimal second-best environmental tax rate in the presence of pre-existing distortions by taxing emissions rather than commodities. First, by extending the general equilibrium model in the literature, we find that the “Ramsey” formula is different from the traditional one. Both the magnitude of the optimal emission tax rate and the welfare effects of the green tax reform depend on the stage of labor supply curve in which the labor tax is. Second, we analyze other tax systems that are not mentioned in the literature. In a tax system with an environmental tax and an abatement subsidy, the welfare effects of increasing or decreasing the two policy instruments at the same time will be negative.

In order to increase energy security, production of renewable energies has been highly promoted by governments around the world in recent years. The typical base of various policy instruments used for this purpose is gross energy output of renewable energy. However, we show that basing policy instruments on gross energy output will result in problems associated with energy waste, economic inefficiency, and negative environmental effects. We recommend using net energy output as the base to apply price or quantity measures because it is net energy output, not gross energy output, which contributes to energy security. The promotion of gross energy output does not guarantee a positive amount of net energy output. By basing policy instruments on net energy output, energy security can be enhanced and the above mentioned problems can be avoided.

The relationship between economic development and air quality for mainland China is investigated by examining the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). We compile a panel dataset comprising air quality, income, and environmental policy variables for 99 cities from 1992 to 2004 to estimate the EKC relationship. Time-specific fixed effects panel models are estimated and the instrumental variables approach is used to consider the endogeneity of income and policy variables. The regression results indicate that the EKC hypothesis is supported in the case of SO2.

Achieving a balance between land development and environmental protection has always been a challenge for many policy makers around world. The purpose of our project is to build a management system for protected drinking water source watersheds where land development is restricted for reasons of water health and drinking safety. Ideally under this proposed management system, land development is not considered taboo, but can proceed with preconditions. We first divided a protected area into two protection zones for different types of regulations. In the first zone, any type of land development is strictly prohibited, as the currently dominant philosophy for watershed protection. In the second zone, development is allowed but only when a permit with more environmental protection requirements is granted by a responsible governmental agency. In response to land development regulations, we proposed three compensation programs to the landowners of the protected watersheds to reduce their resistance on the inclusion of their properties into the designated protected areas. How to delineate and divide a protected area for different levels of regulation is thus a concern of all parties involved in management and compensation programs. In this paper, we demonstrate a case study on the Kao-Ping River Watershed, a subtropical watershed with highly heterogeneous land uses and a wide range of elevations in southern Taiwan. Through this study, we empirically examined the feasibility of the proposed management and compensation schemes. The targeted water pollution abatement goals were regarded as the basis of determining the area requirements for these two types of protection zones. Under this principle, the Arc/View GIS software and two water quality prediction models, QUAL2E and GWLF, were repeatedly applied to simulate the effects of water pollution reduction with different acreage of development-restricted areas. The optimal areas of the protected zones from the modeling results were further used to estimate the amounts of compensation fees based on the three following mechanisms: land banking, conservation easement, and transferable development rights.

The main purpose of this study is to examine how risk perception is influenced by the type of disaster (flood or landslide) and victim characteristics. The data reported here are based on the National Risk Perception Survey (NRPS) that was administered for the victims and the general public in Taiwan in 2004. In that year, many towns in Taiwan were seriously affected by floods and landslides, resulting in huge economic losses and fatalities. The primary findings are: (1) the victims and the general public are concerned about the different potential hazards that might affect their residential area, (2) the negative associations between the sense of controllability and the perceived impact is high for landslide victims, but not for flood victims, and (3) disaster type, gender, and previously experienced disasters are good predictors of victims' attitudes toward natural disasters.

In this study, a radio-frequency (RF) plasma thermolysis reactor was used for pyrolyzing the biomass waste of rice straw. The effects of some major system parameters on the performance of the pyrolysis of rice straw via RF plasma were studied and elucidated. Examining the characteristics of the RF plasma thermolysis reactor with the working gas nitrogen indicates that as the loading power (PWL) increases from 137 to 591 W, the plateau temperature (TP) of plasma increases from 607 to 954 K. The corresponding times of tH to reach TP (the corresponding tH is denoted as tHP) at 607 and 954 K are about 5 and 2 min, respectively. Thus, a higher PWL gives a higher TP with a shorter tHP. The times of tH with PWL of 308, 363, and 591 W to reach a setting temperature (TS) (the corresponding tH is denoted as tHS) at 783 K are about 5, 1.5, and 0.67 min, respectively. Again, a higher PWL needs a shorter tHS to reach the same TS. No tar product is formed via pyrolysis using RF plasma, while about 1.5 wt % of tar is pr...

Almost annually, natural hazards such as floods and landslides cause a great deal of financial loss and human suffering in Taiwan. In order to gain a better understanding of disaster preparedness, this paper examines several factors in relation to hazard mitigation behavior: social economic status (education, income), psychological vulnerability (sense of powerless and helpless), risk perception (perceived impact and control) and social trust. The statistical analysis reported here is based on the “2004 National Risk Perception Survey of Floods and Landslides in Taiwan”. The main findings include: (1) in comparison with general public, victims are less willing to adopt risk mitigation measures than the public, even though they perceive larger impacts, worry more about the hazard, and pay more attention to hazard information; (2) trust, risk perception and social economic status are positive predictors for mitigation intentions, whereas psychological vulnerability is a negative predictor; and (3) psychological variables are stronger predictors for mitigation intentions than that of socio-economic variables. In light of these findings, the policy implications and intervention strategy are also discussed.

We employ a probabilistic seismic risk analysis to estimate exceedance probability curves, average annual loss (AAL) and probable maximum loss (PML) of building stocks in Taipei. It utilizes an event‐driven loss estimation model, HAZ‐Taiwan, and develops its pre‐processing and post‐processing software modules. The pre‐processing module establishes a set of hazard‐consistent scenario earthquakes. The HAZ‐Taiwan model estimates hazards, vulnerabilities and economic losses for each scenario earthquake. The aggregate and occurrence exceedance probability curves for building losses and their confidence intervals are simulated using the Monte Carlo simulation in the postprocessing module. It is found that the exceedance probability of an aggregate loss of USD 1.22 billion is 0.001. This amount of loss is approximately 2.78% of the total building stocks in Taipei. Its 5%‐95% confidence intervals range from USD 1.13–1.31 billion. The average annual loss of buildings in Taipei is currently USD 32 million,...

This paper examines the problem of non-cooperative fishing between Mainland China (MC) and Taiwan (TW) as well as the effects of rising sea surface temperature (SST) on the grey mullet fishery. The results show that Taiwan can expand its fleets to a greater extent when facing an imperfectly elastic demand for fish than when facing a perfectly elastic demand. In addition, when consumer welfare is included in the determination of the size of fleets, fleet size can expand more than when profit is considered alone. It is also shown that the expansion of the fleets in MC and the rising SST cause the rent obtained from the TW fishery to decline, and that Taiwan may partially offset such an adverse effect by adjusting the fleet size.

This paper develops a general model that addresses the starting point bias in the dichotomous choice evaluation data by incorporating both the anchoring effect and yea-saying bias. The model is applied to a contingent valuation study that evaluated the health benefits of air quality improvement in three major metropolitan areas in Taiwan. The empirical evidence shows a strong anchoring effect but an insignificant yea-saying bias. The results show a serious understated willingness to pay if the biases in anchoring and yea-saying are not controlled.

Society benefits from rivers in many aspects. To the extent of water resources management, one of the salient issues is that the social benefit of in-stream water quality improvements is often difficult to be quantified for possible cost justification in many water pollution control programs. The difficulties arise from that many service flows of water quality are not channelled through the market system to consumers and producers. With different socio-economic structures, such valuation could be even more challenging when taking river basins with low-income level into account. Recent advances in fuzzy set theory provide a germain insight to viewing the in-stream water quality as a kind of fuzzy resource due to varying awareness of the quality of life. This paper provides a technical analysis using the fuzzy contingent valuation mothod (FCVM) to value in-stream water quality improvements in terms of three fuzzy resources from aesthetic to recreational, and to ecological aspects. Traditional CVM may allow interest groups or affected parties to join and present a more flexible asset assessment with respect to the prescribed environmental features in the river corridor. Yet the FCVM provides a mechanism that lies in providing a mapping (via fuzzy set theory) from a survey of respondents’ valuation of subjective assessments of water quality into objective economic measures in terms of water quality parameters that management can more directly manipulate. With this new tool, the traditional CVM assessment outputs in a well-developed river basin may even lead to derive a simular valuaton function in a form of a regression equation in a developing river basin where the incme level is relatively low. As part of the sustainablity analysis basin wide, a case study in Taiwan showed that such effort may provide supportive information for cost benefit analysis in many water pollution control programs corresponding to different temporal and spatial scales.

The fact that water flows to the lowest level uni-directionally is a very specific and useful property of water. By utilizing this property, we design a trading-ratio system (TRS) of tradable discharge permits for water pollution control. Such a trading-ratio system has three main characteristics: (1) the zonal effluent cap is set by taking into account the water pollutant loads transferred from the upstream zones; (2) the trading ratios are set equal to the exogenous transfer coefficients among zones; and (3) permits are freely tradable among dischargers according to the trading ratios. This paper shows that the TRS can take care of the location effect of a discharge and can achieve the predetermined standards of environmental quality at minimum aggregate abatement costs. Problems with hot spots and free riding can be avoided, and the burdens on both dischargers and the environmental authority should be relatively light.

Over the last 5 years the air quality in Taiwan’s cities has gradually improved. Part of the credit for the improvement has been given to the air emission fee program that was first implemented in 1995. Before then, the traditional command-and-control program and tax-allowance subsidy were the two major instruments used for air pollution control. The Air Pollution Control Act was revised in early 1999. Among its many new features, the most important one was a new control program, the cap-and-trade program. Moving from a fee to a cap-and-trade program has been a unique Taiwan experience. The purpose of this article is to compare the four existing programs (i.e., command-and-control, tax-allowance subsidy, emission fee, cap-and-trade) in terms of both economic and public choice theories.

This paper combines data from a double-bounded referendum contingent valuation survey and a travel cost survey. Rather than linking the two data sets through a common utility function, as in Cameron (1992) and Niklitschek and Leon (1996), we link them through the expenditure difference function. By using the expenditure difference approach, the parameters and their standard errors for individual preferences can be easily extracted, and the trip demand function and exact welfare measure of quality improvements can be estimated. This approach is illustrated in a case study that evaluates the benefits resulting from water quality improvements in the Tamshui river system in the Taipei Metropolitan Area of Taiwan. The empirical estimation results show that the use value becomes much larger when the water quality improves to a higher level. In addition, the nonuse value makes up a large share of the total value of improving water quality; thus the nonuse value could be crucial for examining projects aimed at improving the water quality of the four rivers in the Tamshui river system.

This study uses empirical agricultural impact models to compare the U.S. climate change predictions of 16 General Circulation Models (GCMs). The impact analysis provides a policy-relevant index by which to judge complex climate predictions. National aggregate impacts vary widely across the 16 GCMs because of varying regional and seasonal patterns of predicted climate change. Examining the predicted impacts from the full set of GCMs reveals that the seasonal detail in the GCM predictions is so noisy that it is not significantly different from a constant annual change. However, a consistent regional pattern does emerge across the set of models. Nonetheless, aggregating climate change across seasons and regions within the United States, using a national-annual climate change provides a reasonable and efficient approximation to the expected impact predicted by the 16 GCM models.

The potential conflict between protection of water quality and economic development by different uses of land within river basins is a common problem in regional planning. Many studies have applied multiobjective decision analysis under uncertainty to problems of this kind. This paper presents a variation on gray programming and fuzzy programming by combining the two approaches in an interactive multiobjective framework. The interactive fuzzy interval multiobjective mixed integer programming approach is illustrated in a case study for the evaluation of optimal wastewater treatment strategies for water pollution control in a river basin. In particular, it demonstrates how different types of uncertainty in a water pollution control system can be quantified and combined through the use of interval numbers and membership functions. The results indicate that such an approach is useful for handling system complexity and generating more flexible policies for water quality management in river basins.

A contingent valuation survey was conducted in Taiwan to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid a recurrence of the episode of acute respiratory illness most recently experienced by the respondent. We estimate a model in which willingness to pay depends on the attributes of the illness (duration and number of symptoms, and nature of the illness) and on respondent characteristics (such as income and health history), and allow mitigating behavior to be endogenously determined with willingness to pay. WTP of Taiwanese households is compared with benefits transfer extrapolations that adjust WTP for the United States by Taiwan household income, relative to U.S. household income.

Written by a distinguished group of Asian social scientists, this study summarizes and synthesizes the economic impacts of the crisis on individual countries and their policy response since 2008, and in particular carefully scrutinizes the immediate and remote causes of the crisis. It not only offers an assessment of its impacts, and identifies specific country measures that can be undertaken to stabilize the situation, but also looks at the crisis from three important economic perspectives: that of a healthy fiscal system, international trade, and the energy market.

Written by a distinguished group of Asian social scientists, this study summarizes and synthesizes the economic impacts of the crisis on individual countries and their policy response since 2008, and in particular carefully scrutinizes the immediate and remote causes of the crisis. It not only offers an assessment of its impacts, and identifies specific country measures that can be undertaken to stabilize the situation, but also looks at the crisis from three important economic perspectives: that of a healthy fiscal system, international trade, and the energy market.

In their recently revised book Baumol and Oates (“The Theory of Environmental Policy,” 2nd ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK 1988) accept Bird's argument on the optimal taxation policy when externalities are shiftable and depletable. Their conclusion is that the standard Pigouvian tax which is placed upon the generator of a negative externality can be extended to tax the victims who shift the externality to others or extended to compensate recipients in order to achieve Pareto optimality. It is shown in this paper that their conclusion is not free from error, because the possibility of resisting a shifted externality and conjectural variations by recipients is not recognized. Whether an externality is shiftable depends not only on the shifting activity of the original victim but also the resisting activity of his neighbors and their conjectures about each other's action. As such, the shifters should be taxed and the recipients should be compensated at the same rate per unit of externality shifted if the tax base is the output of the shifting and resisting activities. On the other hand, if the tax base is the input which produced the shifting of the externality, then both the shifters and the recipients should be subject to a tax (or subsidy) per unit of input that they have engaged in. Whether it is a tax or a subsidy depends on the direction and magnitude of the conjectural variation. The model and its policy implication can be generalized to cover the omnipresent and wasteful rent seeking activities.

This paper employs probabilistic risk analysis to estimate exceedance probability curves, average annual loss (AAL) and probable maximum loss (PML) for seismic hazards. It utilizes and event-driven loss estimation model, HAZ-Taiwan, and develops its pre-processing and post-processing software modules. First, the pre-processingmodule establishes a set of hazard-consistent scenarios. Then, the HAZ-Taiwan modelextimates hazards, vulnerabilities and economic losses for each scenario. Finally, the aggregate and occurrence exceedance probability curves for losses and theirconfidence intervals are simulated using the Monte Carlo simulation in thepost-processing module. The methodology is then applied to analyze seismic risks in Taipei. It is found that the exceedance probability of an aggregate loss of NT$40.398 billion is 0.001. This amount of loss is approximately 2.78% of the total stock of buildings in Taipei. Its 5%-95% confidence intervals range from NT$37.41-43.12 billion. The average annual loss of buildings in Taipei is NT$1.06 billion r approximately 0.07% of the total stock.

In the last few years, the three major cities in Taiwan have been experimenting with two different demand-side management approaches to reduce the waste generated by households and to promote the recycling of recyclables. Thus, there are three different kinds of approaches of waste management that are concurrently used in Taiwan: fee-per-bag, mandatory recycling with free waste collection services, and the zero price of trash collection. We performed a comparative analysis of these policy instruments to take advantage of this important social experiment. We first developed an economic model for the three different waste charging programs concurrently in use and then performed an empirical study based on the implications from the theoretical analysis. It is clearly seen that the traditional approach of zero pricing of trash collection is very ineffective in terms of waste reduction and recycling. Households have all changed their behavior significantly in those cities with two new approaches. However, of the two, the fee-per-bag program is clearly the most effective approach. The results have important policy implications.

This chapter explores the effect of climate on the value of US agricultural land using a Ricardian model. The research extends previous analyses by including both interseasonal and diurnal climate variation in addition to average temperature and precipitation variables. With these climate variation variables included, small increases in average temperature are predicted to be beneficial. Increases in interannual climate variation are predicted to be generally harmful to US agriculture but decreases in diurnal variation will be beneficial. For centuries analysts have been interested in the impact of weather on crops in order to predict what crops to grow, when to plant and harvest, and what agricultural prices will be each year. With the growing likelihood that accumulating greenhouse gases will change the climate (IPCC, 1996), there has been growing interest in also measuring the impact of climate change on agriculture. Two distinct ways to measure the impacts of climate on agriculture have emerged in the literature: an agronomic approach and a Ricardian rent approach. The agronomic approach (Chapter 2; Adams et al ., 1989, 1990, 1995; Crosson and Katz, 1991; Rosenzweig and Parry, 1994) predicts changes in yield from crop simulation models such as CERES and SOYGRO and then enters these changes in mathematical models of agriculture production and consumption. The Ricardian approach (Johnson and Haigh, 1970; Mendelsohn et al ., 1994, 1996) uses an empirical cross-sectional approach and estimates the relationship between land prices and climatic, economic, and soil variables.

This paper develops a "Ricardian" approach for measuring the economic impact of environmental factors such as climate by examining the direct impact of the environmental factor on land prices. Estimating the model using cross-sectional data on climate, farm-land prices, and other economic and geophysical data for almost 3,000 countries in the United States, we find that higher temperatures in all seasons except autumn reduce average farm values in the United States and more precipitation in all seasons except autumn increases farm values. Applying the model to a global-warming scenario finds a range of impacts depending upon whether the model emphasize the grains through crop-land weights or a broader set of crops through crop-revenue weights. The results of the Ricardian approach show a significantly lower estimated impact of global warming than the traditional production-function approach.