Lit in Review: Climate Change and Investment in Vietnam

Dang, Anh Duc (2012) "Cooperation makes beliefs: Weather variation and sources of social trust in Vietnam" ANU Working Papers in Economics and Econometrics #596.

Dang - a PhD candidate at ANU - begins with Durante's (2009) finding that large weather variation in medieval times led to more collective action in Europe and hence to more social trust. Applying a similar methodology to Vietnam's 1927-1995 regional rainfall variation (both monthly and maximal), Dang shows that regions that had higher weather variability also have higher social trust. Social trust is measured by surveys asking if respondents feel they can trust their community and if there is someone outside their household to whom they could turn for help in hard times. Oddly, while recognizing that migrants are part of an interesting dynamic with social trust, Dang excludes them completely, focusing only on households where at least one adult has lived in that community their entire life. I also find it odd that he is worried about unobserved non-geographic factors that would determine both rainfall and social trust among people who haven't migrated.

Among the implications of this work is that climate change is likely to impact individual adaptive behavior through changing levels of trust and social cooperation. This will tend to mitigate some of its negative effects on individuals.

Chinowsky, Paul, Amy Schweikert, Niko Strzepek, and Kenneth Strzepek (2012) "Road Infrastructure and Climate Change in Vietnam," UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2012/80.

They consider the tradeoff between expanding road access to more areas today and upgrading and maintaining existing roads to prepare for and respond to climate change. Even while assuming sea levels rise by one meter, they show that the large majority of cases involve costs in the lower end of the distribution. Despite that, it is cheaper in terms of foregone roads to adapt to future climate change than to await its eventual impact and rebuild roads once the uncertainty is resolved. In the minimum impact scenario, Vietnam would be no worse off for making adaptive investments.

Lit in Review: Impacts of thte 2010/11 Surge in Food Prices

Ivanic, Maros, Will Martin, Hasan Zaman. (2011). “Estimating the Short-Run Poverty Impacts of the 2010-11 Surge in Food Prices.” World Bank Development Research Group, Policy Research Working Paper 5633, Apr

In the 2007/08 price increase, most of the price increase was concentrated in staple cereals. This meant the effects were concentrated on the poor who had few outside options to shift to. In the current price shock, however, food prices have increased in many more commodities and by less overall. This means there are more substitutions available and much of the hit has affected foods the poor consume less of anyway. As a result, they estimate that only 44 million more people are poor instead of the 105 million more in 07/08.

However, it appears that price transmission is higher this time than last.

How many want to come here?

Gallup reports that of the 700 some-odd million people who want to permanently emigrate, 165 million of them want to come to the US. That would be a group of people roughly equivalent to 53% of the current US population. Though far fewer people want to move to Singapore, they would see an even larger population increase by percent.

The top ten countries whose people want to move here are:

China - 23 million - 2% of them
India - 17 million - 1.5% of them
Nigeria - 17 million - 11% of them
Ethiopia - 10 million - 13% of them
Bangladesh - 8 million - 5% of them
Brazil - 8 million - 4% of them
Mexico - 6 million - 5.5% of them
Philippines - 6 million - 6.5% of them
Vietnam - 5 million - 6% of them
Japan - 3 million - 2% of them

We let in less than 0.6% that many.

Out of that 165 million, Wiki tells me that a record 1 million became naturalized US citizens in 2008, mostly from Mexico, India, and the Philippines. In 1890, 15 percent of the people living here were foreign-born. "By 1970 immigrants accounted for 4.7 percent of the US population, rising to 6.2 percent in 1980 and to an estimated 12.5 percent today."