Economic inequality and burden-sharing in the provision of local environmental quality

摘要

A large, but inconclusive, literature addresses how economic heterogeneity affects the use of local resources and local environmental quality. One Line of thought, which derives from Nash equilibrium provision of public goods, suggests that in contexts in which individual actions degrade local environmental quality, wealthier people in a community will tend to do ore to protect environmental quality. In this paper we report on experiments performed in rural Colombia that were designed to explore the role that economic inequality plays in the 'provision' of local environmental quality.