Environmental Valuation in South Asia (review)

The editors of this volume attempt to tackle the complex issue of economic valuation of the environment’s resources and services. They bring together case studies from across South Asia, expounding upon various economic valuation methods and delving into the application of these methods for specific issues ranging from the effect of salinization and pesticide use on agricultural production to that of air pollution on mortality. Although the book’s broad scope affords a multifaceted understanding of the many challenging issues involved in environmental valuation in the region, the lack of overarching organization or method detracts from its overall effectiveness.

The economic valuation methods presented are varied and painstakingly laid out. The introduction explains that valuation is important because it helps to design sustainable policies, make investment choices based on environmental risk, and accurately measure economic output. Multiple studies, such as one on shrimp farming or another on pesticides in vegetable farming, examine the environmental externalities of production ignored in agriculture and industry. The studies in the book generally treat the environment as an input in the production of a marketable good. For example, studies on forest regeneration consider the regulating services that these forests provide as a portion of the overall production function for downstream economic activity. Just as labor or capital goods contribute to a firm’s production ability, so do ecosystem services. Studies of the storm protection benefits of conserving mangroves, for example, center on regulating services of ecosystems, using this production function technique.

The analysis of parks in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the Indian Sunderban employ the travel cost method, which uses the costs that visitors incur traveling to the site in order to estimate the demand curve for recreation. Yet another alternative is the “hedonic price” approach, which evaluates changes in the value of an environmental good by looking at changes in prices of the good in a parallel market. One study, for example, uses housing prices in Delhi and Kolkata to estimate the benefits of reducing air pollution, and another study uses wage data from industrial workers to show the economic value of a worker’s life.

By including a policy recommendation section after most of the case studies, the book provides interesting accounts of the political dynamics at play in environmental issues in South Asia. These recommendations combine research with suggestions for concrete action. In one case, shrimp farmers’ activities resulted in elevated soil salinity and an associated decline in local agricultural production. The authors of the chapter question what policies might best help remedy this negative externality. They identify a local farmer’s irrigation society as a primary agent of change in this realm and suggest that it might influence the adoption of various salinity control measures, such as rainfall capture, chemical desalination, and taxes on shrimp farmers, that would help internalize the costs of increased land and water salinity.

The book also identifies challenges to conducting research in developing countries and suggests ways that students and researchers can conduct similar research in this field in the future. In this spirit, each study in the book offers a different creative strategy for data collection and analysis in its particular niche. These portions may prove helpful to future research in the field, and the editors are to be commended for so stressing their inclusion.

Although the book presents the reader with a diverse array of valuation strategies, methods, policy recommendations, and research challenges, the volume as a whole lacks a strong, unifying message. In general, compilations of studies organized around a general topic or collected to advance an argument stand to benefit from strong organizational structure and somewhat comparable methods or strategies of valuation. Here we have not only apples and oranges but a whole basket of fruits with no way to compare them. Though the issues discussed in this book are interesting, they are brought forward one after another with little apparent connection, leaving the reader daunted and confused. The content of...