This paper looks at whether bribes for electricity connections affect electricity reliability. Using detailed firmlevel data, we estimate various specifications based upon repeated cross-sections and means-based pseudopanels to show that bribes are closely related to poorer electricity reliability. We find that the propensity to bribe for an electricity connection is associated with an increase...

Ongoing deforestation is a pressing, global environmental issue with direct impacts on climate change, carbon emissions, and biodiversity. There is an intuitive link between economic development and overexploitation of natural resources including forests, but this relationship has proven difficult to establish empirically due to both inadequate data and convoluting geo-climactic factors. In thi...

Groundwater irrigation has been instrumental in enhancing food security and, arguably, in mitigating poverty in developing countries. Groundwater provides timely irrigation, leading to an increase in crop intensity and productivity (Food and Agriculture Organization 2003). But groundwater irrigation also contributes the most to the depletion of groundwater reserves. Countries with significant g...

Most species of baleen whales were subject to intensive overexploitation by commercial whaling in this and previous centuries, and many populations were reduced to small fractions of their original sizes. Here, we review the status of baleen whale stocks, with an emphasis on those that are known or thought to be critically endangered. Current data suggest that, of the various threats potentiall...

Rusa unicolor (Kerr, 1792), or sambar, is the largest Oriental deer. Seven subspecies occur in varied habitats and elevations from India and Sri Lanka throughout southeastern Asia. Body mass and antler length decrease from west to east. R. unicolor is considered ancestral relative to the form of its male-only antlers and social behavior. Populations are vulnerable because of overexploitation fo...

The Loreto Bay National Park was established to protect the area’s ecosystems from habitat destruction and overexploitation. However, the park has not met two of its primary goals: recovery of commercially valuable fish populations and their sustainable use by stakeholders. Based on evidence from the literature, dialogue with stakeholders, a literature review on using recreational fees for mari...

Biologists are nearly unanimous in their belief that humanity is in the process of extirpating a significant portion of the earth's species. The ways in which we are doing so reflect the magnitude and scale of human enterprise. Everything from highway construction to cattle ranching to leaky bait buckets has been implicated in the demise or endangerment of particular species. According to Wilso...

Size and age estimates at sexual maturity were determined for 162 male and 273 female little skates Leucoraja erinacea collected from the western Gulf of Maine. Maturity ogives suggest that 50% maturity in females occurs at age 9.5 years and 480 mm total length (LT), whereas 50% maturity in males occurs at a slightly younger age of 7.7 years and smaller size of 460 mm LT. Age estimates were mad...

A prey-predator model with gestation delay, stage structure for predator, and selective harvesting effort on mature predator is proposed, where taxation is considered as a control instrument to protect the population resource in prey-predator biosystem from overexploitation. It shows that interior equilibrium is locally asymptotically stable when the gestation delay is zero, and there is no per...

This paper concerns resource governance in a remote Balinese coastal community, which faces severe environmental challenges due to overexploitation and habitat destruction. It explores some of the issues raised in 'social capital' debates regarding leadership and public participation toward sustainable natural resource governance. Given the strength of Balinese customary law and the high degree...