Publication: The Poverty/Environment Nexus in Cambodia and Lao People's Democratic Republic
Loading...
Date
2003-01
ISSN
Published
2003-01
Editor(s)
Abstract
Environmental degradation can inflict serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods often depend on natural resource use and their living conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained options may induce the poor to deplete resources and degrade the environment at rates that are incompatible with long-term sustainability. In such cases, degraded resources may precipitate a downward spiral, by further reducing the income and livelihoods of the poor. This "poverty/environment nexus" has become a major issue in the recent literature on sustainable development. In regions where the nexus is significant, jointly addressing problems of poverty and environmental degradation may be more cost-effective than addressing them separately. Empirical evidence on the prevalence and importance of the poverty/environment nexus is sparse because the requisite data are often difficult to obtain in developing countries. The authors use newly available spatial and survey data to investigate the spatial dimension of the nexus in Cambodia, and Lao People's Democratic Republic. The data enable the authors to quantify several environmental problems at the district and provincial level. In a parallel exercise, they map the provincial distribution of poor households. Merging the geographic information on poverty and the environment, the authors search for the nexus using geo-referenced indicator maps and statistical analysis. The results suggest that the nexus is country-specific: geographical, historical, and institutional factors may all play important roles in determining the relative importance of poverty and environment links in different contexts. Joint implementation of poverty and environment strategies may be cost-effective for some environmental problems, but independent implementation may be preferable in many cases as well. Since the search has not revealed a common nexus, the authors conclude on a cautionary note. The evidence suggests that the nexus concept can provide a useful catalyst for country-specific work, but not a general formula for program design.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Dasgupta, Susmita; Deichmann, Uwe; Meisner, Craig; Wheeler, David. 2003. The Poverty/Environment Nexus in Cambodia and Lao People's Democratic Republic. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 2960. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/19172 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Future of Poverty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15)Climate change is increasingly acknowledged as a critical issue with far-reaching socioeconomic implications that extend well beyond environmental concerns. Among the most pressing challenges is its impact on global poverty. This paper projects the potential impacts of unmitigated climate change on global poverty rates between 2023 and 2050. Building on a study that provided a detailed analysis of how temperature changes affect economic productivity, this paper integrates those findings with binned data from 217 countries, sourced from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. By simulating poverty rates and the number of poor under two climate change scenarios, the paper uncovers some alarming trends. One of the primary findings is that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide could be nearly doubled due to climate change. In all scenarios, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to bear the brunt, contributing the largest number of poor people, with estimates ranging between 40.5 million and 73.5 million by 2050. Another significant finding is the disproportionate impact of inequality on poverty. Even small increases in inequality can lead to substantial rises in poverty levels. For instance, if every country’s Gini coefficient increases by just 1 percent between 2022 and 2050, an additional 8.8 million people could be pushed below the international poverty line by 2050. In a more extreme scenario, where every country’s Gini coefficient increases by 10 percent between 2022 and 2050, the number of people falling into poverty could rise by an additional 148.8 million relative to the baseline scenario. These findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive climate policies that not only mitigate environmental impacts but also address socioeconomic vulnerabilities.Publication Central Bank Independence and Sovereign Borrowing(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-25)This paper studies the impact of central bank independence on sovereign borrowing, using an index that captures institutional constraints on central bank lending to the government across 155 countries from 1972 to 2023. The findings show that tighter lending to the executive significantly reduces sovereign interest rates and raises the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio in developing countries. These effects reflect the executive’s improved ability to borrow at lower costs under greater central bank independence. The results are robust to multiple tests, but there are no significant effects in advanced economies. From a policy perspective, the results highlight the key role of independent central banks as catalysts for reducing governments’ borrowing costs and enhancing the government’s borrowing capacity.Publication Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03)This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.Publication Crowding Out and Banking Crises(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-22)This paper studies the effect of government issuance on firm issuance during banking crises using transaction-level bond and loan data from 66 countries between 1991 and 2017. Governments rarely issue loans, preferring to issue in bond markets. In contrast, firms receive most of their financing from banks. During banking crises, as the supply of domestic loans decreases, firms switch to issuing bonds in domestic markets. The paper uses a novel instrument based on maturing debt to overcome the potential endogeneity of government issuance. The findings show that firms must compete with the government for funds in the domestic bond market and are crowded out from this market as a result. This happens not only in developing countries, but in advanced countries as well. The paper also shows that firms with the ability to tap international debt markets switch to these markets when crowding out occurs in domestic bond markets. Lastly, the paper shows that more developed domestic bond markets mitigate, but do not eliminate, the degree to which crowding out occurs.Publication Designing and Analyzing Powerful Experiments(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-22)This paper offers practical advice on how to improve statistical power in randomized experiments through choices and actions researchers can take at the design, implementation, and analysis stages. At the design stage, the choice of estimand, choice of treatment, and decisions that affect the residual variance and intra-cluster correlation can all affect power for a given sample size. At the implementation stage, researchers can boost power through increasing compliance with treatment, reducing attrition, and improving outcome measurement. At the analysis stage, power can be increased through using different test statistics or estimands, through the choice of control variables, and through incorporating informative priors in a Bayesian analysis. A key message is that it does not make sense to talk of “the” power of an experiment. A study can be well-powered for one outcome or estimand, but not others, and a fixed sample size can yield very different levels of power depending on researcher decisions.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Poverty Environment Nexus : Sustainable Approaches to Poverty Reduction in Cambodia, Lao PDR and Vietnam(Washington, DC, 2006-06)This is a draft edition of the Poverty Environment Nexus (PEN) report for Cambodia, Lao PDR and Vietnam. The purpose of this conference edition is to present the findings from the studies that have been undertaken in each country over the last three years as well as to obtain relevant comments and feedback from the conference participants that could be included in the final edition of the report. The material presented in this report is based upon comprehensive case studies as well as national analytical work performed in each country. This second phase of the PEN study is designed to address several of the unsolved issues faced by the first phase and within the existing PEN literature on Cambodia, Lao PDR and Vietnam. Since the earlier study found that the nexus may often be identified at disaggregated, or local, levels, the analysis in the second phase of the study was conducted both at the regional, provincial and district levels for the national studies (macro-levels) and on the district, village, commune, and household levels in the (case) studies (micro-level). This combination of macro and micro approaches results in more substantive findings, which are elaborated in detail in these elaborations, may then lead to a better scope for defining policy interventions.Publication Environmental Priorities and Poverty Reduction : A Country Environmental Analysis for Colombia(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007)The analysis of the cost of environmental degradation conducted as part of the country environmental analysis (CEA) shows that the most costly problems associated with environmental degradation are urban and indoor air pollution; inadequate water supply, sanitation, and hygiene; natural disasters (such as flooding and landslides); and land degradation. The burden of these costs falls most heavily on vulnerable segments of the population. To address these problems, this report identifies a number of cost-effective policy interventions that could be adopted in the short and medium terms to support sustainable development goals. In recent decades, considerable progress has been made in addressing the water and the forestry environmental agendas. The impact of environmental degradation on the most vulnerable groups suggests the need to increase emphasis on environmental health issues. However, the environmental management agenda has yet to catch up with this shift in priorities from watershed and forestry to environmental health problems because mechanisms in the current institutional structure to signal these changes are not yet in place. Improved monitoring and dissemination of information on environmental outcomes, assignment of accountability for environmental actions and outcomes, and involvement of a broad range of stakeholders are three important mechanisms to allow these signals to be picked up.Publication Mainstreaming Environment and Climate Change in the Implementation of Poverty Reduction Strategies(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-06)Poverty reduction strategies (PRSs) provide a central framework for macroeconomic, structural, and social policies in developing countries. Because of the numerous and complex links between environment and poverty, it is important that environmental issues are taken into account in the PRS process. This paper follows six previous assessments of the degree of mainstreaming environment in the PRS process using a similar methodology to present trends and provide an understanding of the effectiveness of environmental interventions in reducing poverty. However, it goes beyond previous assessments in three important ways. In-depth country case studies of the evolution of environmental mainstreaming in the PRS process over time. Many countries have now gone through several iterations of their poverty reduction strategies and have received a sequence of credits designed to implement key aspects of these strategies, making it possible to see how the process of mainstreaming environment in the strategies has evolved over time. In this assessment, the authors conduct detailed case studies of this evolution in Ghana, Albania, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. The choice of countries was based on the maturity of each country's PRS process, taking into consideration country size, lending volume, and vulnerability to climate change. An assessment of climate change mainstreaming in the PRS process in the same four countries. Like environment as a whole, the potential impacts of climate change have often been considered separately, if at all rather than as an integral part of development policies. An evaluation of environmental development policy loans (DPLs) in several middle income countries (Brazil, Gabon, and Mexico). DPLs represent an important opportunity to mainstream environment and climate change into middle-income countries' growth and development. This review assesses the process by which environmental DPLs have been prepared and the effectiveness with which they have been implemented.Publication Poverty Reduction Strategies and Environment : A Review of 40 Interim and Full Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs)(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-06)This review systematically assesses the focus of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) on environment-related issues. A total of 40 Interim and full PRSPs from countries in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central and East Asia are reviewed. Four major questions: are posed: (i) What issues of environmental concerns and opportunities are identified in the PRSPs?; (ii) To what extent are poverty-environment causal links analyzed?; (iii) To what extent are environmental management responses and indicators put in place as part of the poverty reduction efforts?; and (iv) To what extent has the design and documentation of the process allowed for mainstreaming the environment? The review finds:: There is considerable variation across countries in the degree of mainstreaming: from a high score of 2.2 (Mozambique) to a low of 0.3 (Sao Tome Principe). Scores indicate the approximate level of attention given to environmental matters in the PRSPs. Some variation across countries is legitimate and to be expected, but there is no reason to believe that the lower scoring countries are free from concerns of environmental health and natural resources degradation linked to poverty. Finally, it should be recalled that a PRSP is only the written expression of an underlying and still emerging process of participation and implementation. What ultimately matters are the results on the ground, which cannot be evaluated across 40 countries at this point in time.Publication Forestry in the Middle East and North Africa : An Implementation Review(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002)In the Middle East and North Africa Region, forest resources are generally limited, as is their contribution to GDP, and it is for this reason their importance is often overlooked. However, forestry's contribution to natural resource and environmental management, is significant, which should not be underestimated. The report, implemented as an input to the development of a Bank Forestry Strategy in guiding its work in the sector, reviews the Bank-assisted forestry projects in the region over the last ten years, defines the regional forests, and describes its current status, and related policy and economic issues, including the need of civil society, and private sector involvement in forestry related issues. It is highlighted that ultimately, the decisions taken on the directions to be followed by the Bank, would be based on sound knowledge of the overall regional aspects, proposing Economic and Sector Work for the future. The report outlines appropriate policy formulation and technical solutions, but emphasizes that local communities must be directly involved in the planning, implementation, and monitoring of forestry development activities. This approach implies that public administrations, responsible for forestry development, become fully decentralized, and capable of strengthening local capacity.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-05)Digitalization is the transformational opportunity of our time. The digital sector has become a powerhouse of innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Value added in the IT services sector grew at 8 percent annually during 2000–22, nearly twice as fast as the global economy. Employment growth in IT services reached 7 percent annually, six times higher than total employment growth. The diffusion and adoption of digital technologies are just as critical as their invention. Digital uptake has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1.5 billion new internet users added from 2018 to 2022. The share of firms investing in digital solutions around the world has more than doubled from 2020 to 2022. Low-income countries, vulnerable populations, and small firms, however, have been falling behind, while transformative digital innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) have been accelerating in higher-income countries. Although more than 90 percent of the population in high-income countries was online in 2022, only one in four people in low-income countries used the internet, and the speed of their connection was typically only a small fraction of that in wealthier countries. As businesses in technologically advanced countries integrate generative AI into their products and services, less than half of the businesses in many low- and middle-income countries have an internet connection. The growing digital divide is exacerbating the poverty and productivity gaps between richer and poorer economies. The Digital Progress and Trends Report series will track global digitalization progress and highlight policy trends, debates, and implications for low- and middle-income countries. The series adds to the global efforts to study the progress and trends of digitalization in two main ways: · By compiling, curating, and analyzing data from diverse sources to present a comprehensive picture of digitalization in low- and middle-income countries, including in-depth analyses on understudied topics. · By developing insights on policy opportunities, challenges, and debates and reflecting the perspectives of various stakeholders and the World Bank’s operational experiences. This report, the first in the series, aims to inform evidence-based policy making and motivate action among internal and external audiences and stakeholders. The report will bring global attention to high-performing countries that have valuable experience to share as well as to areas where efforts will need to be redoubled.Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication Commodity Markets Outlook, October 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-29)Commodity prices are expected to decrease by 5 percent in 2025 and 2 percent in 2026. The projected declines are led by oil prices but tempered by price increases for natural gas and a stable outlook for metals and agricultural raw materials. The possibility of escalating conflict in the Middle East represents a substantial near-term upside risk to energy prices, with potential knock-on consequences for other commodities. However, over the forecast horizon, longer-term dynamics—including decelerating global oil demand, diversifying oil production, and ample oil supply capacity—suggest sizable downside risks to oil prices, especially if OPEC+ unwinds its latest production cuts. There are also dual risks to industrial commodity demand stemming from economic activity. On the one hand, concerted stimulus in China and above-trend growth in the United States could push commodity prices higher. On the other, weaker-than-anticipated global industrial activity could dampen them. Following several overlapping global shocks in the early 2020s, which drove parallel swings in commodity prices, commodity markets appear to be departing from a period of tight synchronization. A Special Focus analyzes commodity price synchronization over time and considers the relative importance across commodity cycles of a wide range of demand and supply shocks, including global demand shocks and shocks specific to different commodity markets. It concludes that, while supply shocks were the dominant commodity price driver in the early 2000s and around the global financial crisis, post-pandemic price movements have been more substantially shaped by commodity-specific shocks, such as those related to conflicts.Publication Is US Trade Policy Reshaping Global Supply Chains ?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-01)This paper examines the reshaping of supply chains using detailed US 10-digit import data (tariff-line level) between 2017 and 2022. The results show that while US-China decoupling in bilateral trade is real, supply chains remain intertwined with China. Over the period, China’s share of US imports fell from 22 to 16 percent. The paper shows that the decline is due to US tariffs. US imports from China are being replaced with imports from large developing countries with revealed comparative advantage in a product. Countries replacing China tend to be deeply integrated into China’s supply chains and are experiencing faster import growth from China, especially in strategic industries. Put differently, to displace China on the export side, countries must embrace China’s supply chains. Within products, the reorientation of trade is consistent with a “China + 1” strategy, as opposed to diversified sourcing across multiple countries. There is some evidence of nearshoring, but it is exclusive to border nations, and there is no consistent evidence of reshoring. Despite the significant reshaping, China remained the top supplier of imported goods to the US in 2022.