Surender Kumar

This book discusses the important issue of the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of agricultural residue burning, common in agricultural practices in many parts of the world. In particular, it focuses on the pollution caused by rice residue burning using primary survey data from Punjab, India. It discusses emerging solutions to agricultural waste burning that are cost-effective in terms of both money and time. The burning of agricultural residue causes severe pollution in land, water and air and contributes to increased ozone levels and climate change in the long term. However, appropriate assessments have not been undertaken so far to demonstrate the relevant impact of agriculture-based pollution, especially residue burning. This book addresses this gap in the literature. Punjab has been used as a case study as it is the chief granary of India, contributing to 27.2 percent of the Indian national produce of rice and 43.8 percent of wheat. It is presumed that the findings from this state will be useful not only for other agricultural areas in India, but across the world. This book, therefore, sensitizes policy makers, researchers and students about the impacts of air pollution caused by agricultural residue burning---a subject not much dealt in the literature---and provides a way forward.

This book highlights methodological approaches for the economics of sustainable development and brings together recent empirical work done in India, especially by Dr. Surender Kumar and Dr. Shunsuke Managi. Various chapters in this book use Indian data to show the very wide applicability of methodologies in the theory of production for dealing with many empirical issues of environmentally sustainable development in a developing country. I congratulate the authors for the time and effort devoted to compiling this very useful reference on the subject and the publishers for publishing this volume. The methodologies of cost functions, distance functions, and production fu- tions have been used in many recent studies and in the studies reported in this book for environmental valuation. Environmental valuation is required for designing policy instruments like pollution taxes for sustainable development and for meas- ing green GDP. The UN methodology of integrated environmental and economic accounting provides ways of measuring the cost of maintaining environmental resources at sustainable levels or the maintenance cost for estimating green GDP. Some of the chapters in this book show that the methodology of distance functions could be used for estimating the cost of environmentally sustainable development.

This book highlights methodological approaches for the economics of sustainable development and brings together recent empirical work done in India, especially by Dr. Surender Kumar and Dr. Shunsuke Managi. Various chapters in this book use Indian data to show the very wide applicability of methodologies in the theory of production for dealing with many empirical issues of environmentally sustainable development in a developing country. I congratulate the authors for the time and effort devoted to compiling this very useful reference on the subject and the publishers for publishing this volume. The methodologies of cost functions, distance functions, and production fu- tions have been used in many recent studies and in the studies reported in this book for environmental valuation. Environmental valuation is required for designing policy instruments like pollution taxes for sustainable development and for meas- ing green GDP. The UN methodology of integrated environmental and economic accounting provides ways of measuring the cost of maintaining environmental resources at sustainable levels or the maintenance cost for estimating green GDP. Some of the chapters in this book show that the methodology of distance functions could be used for estimating the cost of environmentally sustainable development.