Health Equity: 07/07/10

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

[EQ] Valuing the Environment - Economics for a Sustainable Future

Valuing the Environment
Economics for a Sustainable Future

David Glover leads the Environmental Economics program at Canada’s International Development Research Centre IDRC

IDRC 2010 - ISBN 978-1-55250-476-5 - e-ISBN 978-1-55250-479-6 - 108 pp.

Disponible en français / Disponible en español

Full text available online at: http://bit.ly/acECCN

“……A vast number of people in developing countries depend on the natural environment for their livelihoods — on farmland or forests, wetlands or coastal areas. For these people, the environment is much more than a source of recreation — it is the basis of the economy. But poorly functioning markets, incomplete property rights, and misguided policies can drive people’s behaviour in ways that are rational in the short term or from an individual’s point of view, but harmful to the environment and future generations.

Economics has much to offer in understanding and influencing this behaviour. It also provides tools for decision-makers faced with difficult choices. How can we compare the value of environmental benefits to the costs of safeguarding them? How can we assess the impacts of environmental action (or inaction) on the poor? How should we share the costs of improvements?

This book shows how researchers from four of IDRC’s regional environmental economics networks have dealt with questions like these in a wide variety of situations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It brings together insights from more than 15 years of research and assesses their impact on policy and the research community. It concludes by looking at the future of environmental economics in the developing regions of the world.

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Executive Summary 2010

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Foreword Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge, UK 2010

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Preface 2010

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Part 1. The Issues 2010

This chapter outlines the central ideas and principles of environmental economics, and traces the evolution of the regional et works that have been established to promote the approach in developing countries.

Basic principles

Market and policy failures

The search for solutions

Environmental economics in developing countries

Recognizing a gap

From Rio to reality

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Part 2. Environmental Economics in Action 2010

Thirty stories from the field illustrate the kinds of questions that environmental economics can help answer. These vignettes showcase the work of researchers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and give a sense of how their findings have helped

improve environmental policies.

Valuing the environment

Applying the principles

Financing conservation

Information for policy design

Putting ideas into action

Economics: Helping in the search for solutions

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Part 3. Pioneers of Change 2010

This section describes in detail how the regional environmental economics networks have developed the skills of researchers, and introduces a few of the talented individuals who are carrying the work forward into new areas.

A model for building skills

Developing careers

Drawing in the media

Educating students

Applying research to development

Country-to-country collaboration

Institutionalizing environmental economics

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Part 4. Lessons and Future Directions 2010

This chapter presents key lessons drawn from IDRC’s 15-year effort to build the field of environmental economics in developing countries. It also looks ahead to a future in which economic principles are applied wherever they can help make action to protect the environment more effective, more equitable, and less costly.

Lessons for policymakers

Future directions
Into the mainstream

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Glossary 2010

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT: Bibliography 2010

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[EQ] Global Justice and the Social Determinants of Health

Global Justice and the Social Determinants of Health

Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 24.2 (Summer 2010)

Sridhar Venkatapuram

June 14, 2010

Available online at: http://bit.ly/cQtPe7

“…..Public scrutiny and deliberation are central to both the sciences and ethical reasoning. In the sciences, research findings and analyses are put forward in the public arena not simply to announce new evidence but also for public examination, to be either corroborated or disputed. In ethics there is a similar process, whereby reasoned arguments are put forward about what is the good or right thing to do.

In either domain, knowledge is expanded through the coherence and acceptance of the analyses and arguments, which depends on their being able to withstand public scrutiny. Therefore, when scientific and ethical arguments are brought together, the task of public deliberation is twofold, as it must encompass the empirical and the normative; and when the arguments concern an issue of such enormous scope as global health inequalities, public deliberation has to include national and global domains.

It is precisely this kind of twofold public deliberation that the World Health Organization's (WHO) Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) anticipated when it released its final report at the end of 2008. In that report, the commission combined epidemiological analysis of health inequalities within and across countries with an essentially cosmopolitan ethical argument for motivating global social action to mitigate ill health and health inequalities. By doing so the commission brought together the consideration of scientific evidence, the centrality of global public deliberation to global health, and a view on global social justice……..”

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[EQ] Human Development: Definitions, Critiques, and Related Concepts

Human Development: Definitions, Critiques, and Related Concepts

Sabina Alkire, Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.
Oxford Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

United Nations Development Programme

Human Development Reports - Research Paper - June 2010

Available online PDF [100p.] at: http://bit.ly/d0Wlz4

The purpose of this background paper is:
i) to synthesize the discussions regarding the concept of human development, so as to inform the 2010 Report’s definition, and
ii) drawing on the extensive policy and academic literatures, to propose relationships between the concept of human development and four related concepts:
    - the Millennium Development Goals,
    - Human Rights,
    - Human Security, and
    - Happiness. Inequality, the duration of outcomes across time, and environmental sustainability are also prominent due to their fundamental importance

The paper is structured as follows. First, we consider the definition of human development that was put forward in the reports from 1990 until 2009. From these reports we observe how human development has been defined, what dimensions it has comprised, and how inequality, time and environmental sustainability have been reflected in this tradition. Building on that basis, together with the accumulated literature on the capability approach and human development from international institutions and academic and policy groups, we propose a ‘capsule’ sentence defining human development, and a succinct exposition of the core concepts.

Human Development is complemented by a number of conceptual frameworks that share similar underlying motivations, but have different emphases, and add value in different ways. Part II of this paper relates human development to other key concepts, showing the synergies between them and also articulating the distinctive contribution of the human development framework.

Comparisons are made with:

– The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

– Human Rights

– Human Security

– Happiness

A post-script to this paper traces the evolution of the World Bank’s concept of poverty from 1946 to the year 2000.

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