Public policies and the conservation of environmental, cultural, and agricultural goods

Cenerini, Francesco

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129907 Copy

Description

Title

Public policies and the conservation of environmental, cultural, and agricultural goods

Author(s)

Cenerini, Francesco

Issue Date

2025-06-25

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Ando, Amy

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Ando, Amy

Committee Member(s)

• Albouy, David Yves
• Kleemans, Marieke
• Skidmore, Marin Elisabeth

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Nonmarket goods
• Indigenous economics
• deforestation
• Indonesia
• East Timor
• Timor-Leste
• Southeast Asia
• language extinction
• ecosystem services
• coffee
• agroforestry

Abstract

Global economic growth and the policies implemented to incentivize it—while clearly representing a positive outcome—have placed unprecedented pressure on many of the world’s public goods, and increased the rates of extinction of both natural and human non-market goods, from tropical forests to linguistic diversity and traditional agricultural systems. For example, Indonesia’s rainforests—among the most important ecosystems on Earth—have suffered high deforestation rates and ecological damage for decades due to government-sponsored internal migration, while up to 90% of the roughly 7,000 currently spoken languages may become extinct by 2100. The loss of these goods—through ecosystem degradation, climate impacts, or the erosion of cultural capital and information—has significant negative welfare implications that many societies would rather avoid and that they are willing to pay a certain amount to reduce or reverse. This dissertation examines whether and how public policies have affected both positively and negatively the long-term conservation of critical environmental, cultural, and agricultural goods in post-colonial or developing-country settings, using both empirical and theoretical tools. In three chapters, I study (a) the long-run ecological impact of a large-scale internal resettlement policy in Indonesia, (b) the long-term effect of compulsory schooling in a minority language—Welsh—on its prevalence in its native region, and (c) a market-based quality-label policy for an export crop—coffee in East Timor—designed to increase incomes, reduce malnutrition, and preserve montane rainforests with minimal enforcement needs. Together, these cases explore the scientific question of how policy design and implementation influence the sustainability of non-market goods amid growth and development pressures. The first chapter studies the environmental consequences of Indonesia’s Transmigration Program—a voluntary resettlement of Javanese and Balinese families into the sparsely populated but heavily forested ”Outer Islands”—in the period after decentralization around 2000. Using a unique 1998 Transmigration Census matched with Indonesian population data and a novel satellite-derived ecosystem integrity index, it asks: Did this internal migration policy impose substantial ecological externalities? Did it play any role in the unprecedented surge in palm oil production in the country? How did transmigrant and indigenous groups affect their surrounding ecosystems after decentralization? The chapter estimates the policy’s long-term effect on ecosystem quality, finding that transmigrant villages became significantly more destructive to their surroundings, especially when fewer indigenous people were present. It quantifies the resulting loss of ecosystem services—on the order of billions of dollars—and provides evidence that integrating migrants with local communities might be beneficial to long-term sustainable resource use. The second chapter turns to cultural goods and examines the case of the Welsh language. Despite growing investment in minority-language preservation across the world, research—and crucially, evidence—on effectiveness has been scant. I exploit a policy change that has made Welshlanguage instruction compulsory in schools across Wales to test whether schooling can increase language survival. Using individual-level data from successive UK Censuses, I estimate how exposure to Welsh classes affects a person’s likelihood of being a Welsh speaker years after leaving school. The chapter shows that the education reform significantly expanded the number of Welsh speakers—raising the probability of speaking Welsh by roughly 3.6% for those affected by the policy—and created tens of thousands of new speakers within two decades. The results vary by gender, pre-existing language prevalence, and age, reflecting the complex social dynamics of cultural transmission: females are both likelier to maintain knowledge of the language without treatment and likelier to take up the language when treated, while the policy is geographically most effective in regions at the higher and lower ends of the pre-policy distribution of speakers. By quantifying costs (about £4,100 to ”create” an additional speaker) and impact, this chapter contributes to understanding the effectiveness and trade-offs of language policies in preserving intangible cultural assets. The third chapter focuses on the competing needs of export-dependent local agroforestry systems, studying coffee production in East Timor. This chapter develops a theory and empirical strategy for designing a Geographical Indication (GI)—a quality and origin label widely used to raise the price and international awareness of traditional agricultural products—for Timorese coffee that can simultaneously improve farmer incomes and conserve rainforest. Shade-grown coffee represents an interesting and understudied case for development policy, as the export crop is tied both to a negative externality—malnutrition due to volatile prices—and a positive one—rainforest conservation. A two-sector land-use model captures trade-offs between food production, coffee, and conservation. It shows that a GI policy—effectively raising farmers’ coffee price—can align private incentives with social objectives, provided it signals true quality differentials to the international market. In order to do the latter, I use data from recent national coffee quality contests to empirically identify regions that consistently produce specialty-grade beans, finding higher elevation farms (above about 945m) and specific regions in the central highlands as prime candidates. Simulations suggest that such GI could yield substantial gains (around $1,600 per farmer per year) while safeguarding forest cover. This work illustrates a low-cost strategy for sustainable rural development in a least-developed country, illustrating an easily replicable empirical method to implement it. Across these chapters, the dissertation connects environmental, development, and cultural economics to address a unified research agenda: understanding how public policy can worsen, mitigate, or reverse the global loss of non-market goods—provided societies want them not to disappear.

Graduation Semester

2025-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129907

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2025 Francesco Cenerini

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