IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jid/journl/y2007v16i2p68-82.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Environmental Damage and its Impacts on Inequality and Poverty: Applications to Brazil and Costa Rica

Author

Listed:
  • Mariano Torras

    (Adelphi University)

Abstract

Accounting for environmental damage is relevant to how one measures the extent and severity of inequality and poverty, and the question of ecological distribution - how the costs associated with environmental damage are distributed across the population - is critical. Following Khan’s (1997) study on Bangladesh, I use environmental damage estimates to adjust inequality and poverty measures for Brazil and Costa Rica. Unlike Khan, I test for different assumptions regarding the ecological distribution. Provisional results indicate that inequality and poverty are understated, and that, under certain assumptions, both worsened in Costa Rica during the 1980s, contrary to what conventional statistics suggest. Want of reliable ecological distribution data, however, suggests that sensitivity analysis around competing assumptions may be preferable to conventional indicators.

Suggested Citation

  • Mariano Torras, 2007. "Environmental Damage and its Impacts on Inequality and Poverty: Applications to Brazil and Costa Rica," Journal of Income Distribution, Ad libros publications inc., vol. 16(2), pages 68-82, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:jid:journl:y:2007:v:16:i:2:p:68-82
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/jid/article/viewFile/5570/4764
    Download Restriction: Some fulltext downloads are only available to subscribers. See JID website for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Brazil; Costa Rica; inequality; poverty; environmental damage; resource depletion;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • O54 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Latin America; Caribbean

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jid:journl:y:2007:v:16:i:2:p:68-82. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Timm Boenke (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gyorkca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.