Three Essays in Development Economics

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dc.contributor.advisorEsteve-Volart, Berta
dc.creatorRubel, Ashfakuddin
dc.date.accessioned2017-07-27T13:44:08Z
dc.date.available2017-07-27T13:44:08Z
dc.date.copyright2017-02-10
dc.date.issued2017-07-27
dc.date.updated2017-07-27T13:44:08Z
dc.degree.disciplineEconomics
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation focuses on certain policies and programmes that could help achieve four of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) endorsed by the United Nations (UN) to be achieved by 2030: ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns, achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, ensure access to water and sanitation for all. The three chapters build upon existing related literature in the field of development economics, with the first chapter offering a theoretical analysis from an environmental perspective and the other two chapters providing empirical contributions to the questions on women empowerment and quality of housing, water and sanitation. Most of the literature on trade and the environment has focused on production-generated pollution and ignored pollution emitted at the consumption stage such as municipal waste and exhaust from automobiles and home heating. The first chapter explores the importance of life-cycle environmental considerations in an oligopoly model of international trade with three countries (two exporters and one importer) and one traded good. It considers the implications of accounting for consumption-generated pollution on the optimal choice of environmental policy and welfare level in the exporting country with the lower marginal abatement cost relative to the other exporting country as well as on the optimal tariff, both when production-generated pollution is perfectly local and when it is a pure public bad. Whereas chapters two and three use data from the 1996 Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS) to study the effects of an intense outreach family planning program implemented in half of the 141 villages of rural Matlab, Bangladesh, from 1977 to 1996, on women's empowerment and on the quality of housing and general sanitation. To be able to capture the multidimensional nature of women's empowerment, we assess the program according to its impacts on different dimensions of women's empowerment: socio-economic and socio-cultural. Our findings support the idea that the family planning program enhanced women's empowerment in the treatment area in the socio-economic dimension and contributed, in some key aspects, to improvements in the quality of housing and sanitary conditions in the treatment area.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/33567
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectEconomics
dc.subject.keywordsInternational trade
dc.subject.keywordsPollution from production and consumption
dc.subject.keywordsWomen empowerment
dc.subject.keywordsHousing quality
dc.subject.keywordsWater and sanitation quality
dc.subject.keywordsSustainable development goals
dc.subject.keywords1996 matlab data
dc.titleThree Essays in Development Economics
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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