The talk will be delivered by Prof. Sabyasachi Das, Ashoka University
26 September, 2023, Bengaluru: The Office of Research and Publications (R&P) at IIM Bangalore will host a research seminar on, ‘Decentralizing the Development-Conservation Trade-off: Evidence from Forestland Diversions in India’, to be led by Prof. Sabyasachi Das, Ashoka University (Economics area), at 4 pm on 5th October 2023, at Classroom C-13.
Abstract: With rapidly depleting natural resources, governments across the world face the task of balancing economic development with conservation efforts. The research studies how the governance structure surrounding environmental policymaking, specifically decentralization of natural resource management, shapes this trade-off by examining the economic projects in India that required diversion of forestland and were submitted to the Indian government for approval. The researchers compile the universe of proposal submissions and their application outcomes and exploit a policy reform that decentralized the approval authority for a certain size of projects from the Central to State governments.
It is found that decentralization significantly increased the number of applications, but reduced the probability of approval. Estimates from a structural model with endogenous applications and approvals indicate that while State governments (as compared to the Center) put a 6% lower weight on economic development (vis-a-vis conservation), they also have 11% lower application cost. This results in a lower quality and higher volume of projects being proposed and approved, resulting in more deforestation without much economic development. From the lens of a dynamic model, the researchers show that while State governments fundamentally value economic development more, they optimally choose to be more stringent in approvals, in response to lower costs and more applications received by them.
Speaker Profile: Dr. Sabyasachi Das is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Ashoka University. He earned his PhD in Economics from Yale University. Prior to joining Ashoka University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi. His fields of specialization include political economy, public economics and applied microeconomics. For his research, he is primarily interested in exploring group inequalities that emerge from various democratic processes.
He has studied gender and caste issues in village elections and meetings in India, and explored governance consequences of political alignment between state and local governments by looking at appointments of bureaucrats. On another front, he is exploring broad electoral systems, plurality rule and proportional representation, and comparing them across countries to determine their effect on representation of minorities in the government.
He is also interested in the themes on development economics in general. Currently, he is exploring how price volatility in wholesale markets in rural India is affected by availability of storage capacity; he is looking at perishable commodities and construction of cold storages to answer this question.
Dr. Sabyasachi Das has taught a course on political economy for the Master’s and PhD students at ISI, Delhi, and has mentored Master’s students at ISI on their thesis writing. He has served as Teaching Assistant for various undergraduate level courses during his stay at Yale, including courses on Public Economics, Law and Economics, and Statistics and Econometrics.
Webpage Link: https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/sabyasachi-das/
The talk will be delivered by Prof. Sabyasachi Das, Ashoka University
26 September, 2023, Bengaluru: The Office of Research and Publications (R&P) at IIM Bangalore will host a research seminar on, ‘Decentralizing the Development-Conservation Trade-off: Evidence from Forestland Diversions in India’, to be led by Prof. Sabyasachi Das, Ashoka University (Economics area), at 4 pm on 5th October 2023, at Classroom C-13.
Abstract: With rapidly depleting natural resources, governments across the world face the task of balancing economic development with conservation efforts. The research studies how the governance structure surrounding environmental policymaking, specifically decentralization of natural resource management, shapes this trade-off by examining the economic projects in India that required diversion of forestland and were submitted to the Indian government for approval. The researchers compile the universe of proposal submissions and their application outcomes and exploit a policy reform that decentralized the approval authority for a certain size of projects from the Central to State governments.
It is found that decentralization significantly increased the number of applications, but reduced the probability of approval. Estimates from a structural model with endogenous applications and approvals indicate that while State governments (as compared to the Center) put a 6% lower weight on economic development (vis-a-vis conservation), they also have 11% lower application cost. This results in a lower quality and higher volume of projects being proposed and approved, resulting in more deforestation without much economic development. From the lens of a dynamic model, the researchers show that while State governments fundamentally value economic development more, they optimally choose to be more stringent in approvals, in response to lower costs and more applications received by them.
Speaker Profile: Dr. Sabyasachi Das is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Ashoka University. He earned his PhD in Economics from Yale University. Prior to joining Ashoka University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi. His fields of specialization include political economy, public economics and applied microeconomics. For his research, he is primarily interested in exploring group inequalities that emerge from various democratic processes.
He has studied gender and caste issues in village elections and meetings in India, and explored governance consequences of political alignment between state and local governments by looking at appointments of bureaucrats. On another front, he is exploring broad electoral systems, plurality rule and proportional representation, and comparing them across countries to determine their effect on representation of minorities in the government.
He is also interested in the themes on development economics in general. Currently, he is exploring how price volatility in wholesale markets in rural India is affected by availability of storage capacity; he is looking at perishable commodities and construction of cold storages to answer this question.
Dr. Sabyasachi Das has taught a course on political economy for the Master’s and PhD students at ISI, Delhi, and has mentored Master’s students at ISI on their thesis writing. He has served as Teaching Assistant for various undergraduate level courses during his stay at Yale, including courses on Public Economics, Law and Economics, and Statistics and Econometrics.
Webpage Link: https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/sabyasachi-das/