The Economics of RegionalPoverty-Environment Programs: An Application for LaoPeople's Democratic Republic

Buys, Piet ; Chomitz, Kenneth ; Dasgupta, Susmita ; Deichmann, Uwe ; Larsen, Bjorn ; Meisner, Craig ; Nygard, Jostein ; Pandey, Kiran ; Pinnoi, Nat ; Wheeler, David R.

World Bank, Washington, D.C.

关键词: AIR POLLUTION;    ASSET INDICATORS;    AVERAGE POVERTY;    BUDGET ALLOCATIONS;    BUDGETARY ALLOCATIONS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-3267
RP-ID  :  WPS3267

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Program administrators are often facedwith the difficult problem of allocating scarce resourcesamong regions in a country when interventions are aimed ataddressing multiple objectives. One main concern is thetradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement ofenvironmental quality. To provide a framework for analysis,the authors develop a model of optimal budget allocationthat allows for variations in three factors:administrators' valuation of objectives; theirwillingness to accept tradeoffs among objectives andregional allotments; and regional administrative costs. Theresults from an application of this model using informationfor Lao People's Democratic Republic show that simplepoverty indicators alone do not provide consistentguidelines for policy. However, when different povertyindicators are embedded in an optimizing model thatincorporates preferences and costs, the resulting provincialallocations are very similar. This suggests that adoption ofa formal analytical approach to resource allocation can helppromote the harmonization of regional policy guidelines.