Three Essays with Spatial Considerations in Natural Resource and Development Economics

Bioeconomic models routinely account for the joint-determinedness of ecological and economic systems. Ecological systems provide benefits, or ecosystem services, to humans and human actions influence the provisioning of those services. To analyze tradeoffs in management, these services are often combined in a welfare function. Simplifying assumptions, designed to preserve model tractability, are common. These assumptions, in some cases, limit the scope of the resulting policy recommendations. We show that analytical tractability can be preserved and policy recommendations improved when finer ecological detail is employed in the specification of ecosystem services. Using a game-theoretic approach, an application of this concept is made by modeling three foundations of the behavioral ecology of wolves: refuge-seeking behavior, optimal foraging group size and territoriality. These behavioral patterns allow us to predict the density of wolves within and across management jurisdictions, which enables us to specify visitor congestion effects on public land, frequency of wildlife viewing, harvest success rates, the number of recreation days within a harvest season and harvest season length. This approach makes a notable contribution by examining management tradeoffs not only between but also within competing consumptive and non-consumptive ecosystem services. Chapter 2: Market accessibility and economic growth: Insights from a new dimension of inequality We modify an endogenous growth model to allow for households' differential access to markets. Such local production spillovers highlight a new dimension of inequality arising through geographic remoteness and predicts divergent growth patterns among countries with poorly market-integrated households. The model is tested using an instrumental variables approach that takes advantage of the relationship between market accessibility and exogenous geographic features of the landscape as well as spatial data derived from a unique global dataset characterizing country-level market accessibility distributions. We find evidence that production spillovers diminish concavely across space before tapering off convexly in remote areas. This result suggests that the marginal household exhibiting production spillovers is located approximately five hours from the nearest market center. The policy implications are that governments could adopt pro-growth inequality-reducing policies using targeted infrastructural investments, relocation subsidies or income redistribution mechanisms. Based on our spillover threshold estimates, these policies would be access-equality enhancing for 5.1 billion people globally and access-equality reducing for 825 million people globally. We also present findings that growth divergence occurs among countries with geographically less pervasive markets. This outcome may explain why wealthier nations exhibit divergent growth paths relative to poorer nations. Chapter 3: Poverty and the spatial dependence of public infrastructure Despite mounting evidence that public infrastructure plays a critical role in poverty alleviation, this branch of empirical work remains focused on highly-localized household-level studies and remains disconnected from economy-wide studies of growth, poverty and distribution. Because public capital investments are often made by central governments, it is possible analyses quantifying local impacts of infrastructural projects are of insufficient scale to capture the consequences of inefficient public expenditures. We use time-varying and georeferenced poverty and public infrastructure data to determine the channels through which public infrastructure influences poverty dynamics. Results suggest that the direct poverty increasing effect of infrastructure-adjusted growth is approximately twice as large in magnitude as the direct poverty-decreasing effect of poverty-adjusted growth. We also find that infrastructure-adjusted growth increases poverty-adjusted growth. After accounting for this amplifying indirect effect of public infrastructure on poverty trends, the positive and negative effects of public infrastructure investment offset and poverty reduction is driven primarily by the poverty-adjusted growth rate. These results highlight that a successful poverty reduction policy will not only make investments in public transportation infrastructure but must also identify those populations in critical need. Our results are consistent with the notion that reckless investment in public capital could perpetuate instead of alleviate geographic poverty traps.