Gamini Herath

Monash University (Malaysia) · Business

“The United Nations Rio+20 summit in 2012 committed governments to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a follow-up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) after their 2015 deadline”. “The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy pea...

Sustainable development has attracted much attention in recent years as a globally relevant development paradigm fully supported by the United Nations (UN). In 2016, the UN accepted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a normative framework for all 193 member countries to be achieved by 2030. The SDGs are complex and interlinked, and methodo...

Rice is the staple diet of the people in Malaysia. Nearly 70% of the rice is produced locally and the rest is imported. Paddy production is highly susceptible to extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. This vulnerability regarding paddy production has increased in recent decades due to climate change (CC). In this study we examined impa...

The Asian region is the fastest growing economic region in the world but it has 2.6 billion people in poverty, 490 million people still go hungry, and 1.7 billion lack access to clean water and sanitation. The UN recently proposed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS 2030 agenda) to overcome these problems accepted by 193 countries. There are 17...

E-waste, or waste generated from electrical and electronic equipment, is considered as one of the fastest-growing waste categories, growing at a rate of 3–5% per year in the world. In 2016, 44.7 million tonnes of e-waste were generated in the world, which is equivalent to 6.1 kg for each person. E-waste is classified as a hazardous waste, but unlik...

In 2015, the UN proposed the Sustainable Development Goals; they were accepted by 193 countries. Sri Lanka faces many challenges in implementing the SDGs. The lack of reliable and recent data is a serious issue. Another issue is the weak institutional capacity of Sri Lanka, which has led to poor governance and policy incoherence. There is no strong...

Climate change is a globally important environmental issue that impacting our economic future and livelihoods. It can affect food security in the developing countries of south East Asia which can be further exacerbated due to increased natural disasters. Various policies are adopted in different countries to mitigate climate change. Developing coun...

Sustainable Tourism as a concept respects both local people, the traveler, cultural heritage and the environment. It should meet the needs of and opportunity for the future. But operationalizing sustainable tourism is problematic due to analytical weaknesses, conceptual criticisms and the need to redefine better perspectives. Asia faces many challe...

Human activities, such as industrial, agricultural, and domestic pursuits, discharge effluents into riverine ecological systems that contains aquatic resources, such as fish, which are also used by humans. We conducted case studies in Malaysia to investigate the impacts of these human activities on water and fish resources, as well as on human well...

Studies have typically emphasized one of three major policy alternatives—government (state) ownership, privatization, or user self-governance—to address overuse of “the commons” as a natural resource shared by many competing users. Studies tend to focus on each alternative separately. Government ownership or privatization is usually understood to u...

Climate change (CC) is one of the most critical anthropogenic environmental impacts that has been experienced globally in recent decades. It can profoundly alter our economic future and livelihood. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed that the earth’s climate is getting warmer, with the likely increase in temperature r...

When demand for a good exceeds its supply, queuing mechanisms are commonly used to allocate the good in question to citizens. However, very long queues result in excessive wait times and this can lead to violence. As such, the purpose of this paper is to analyze two stochastic models of goods allocation with queuing and the possibility of violence....

In order to minimize the risk of biological invasions in a country called Home, a seaport manager must inspect a certain number of arriving ships successfully in a time period of interest. Given that inspections are costly, how should our seaport manager, interested in minimizing the total expected cost of inspections, allocate resources for conduc...

In order to minimize the risk of biological invasions in a country called Home, a seaport manager must inspect a certain number of arriving ships successfully in a time period of interest. Given that inspections are costly, how should our seaport manager, interested in minimizing the total expected cost of inspections, allocate resources for conduc...

Forest management policy decisions are complex due to the multiple-use nature of goods and services from forests, difficulty in monetary valuation of ecological services and the involvement of a large number of stakeholders. Multi-attribute decision techniques can be used to synthesise stakeholder preferences related to regional forest planning bec...

In Sri Lanka, the major institutional innovation introduced since the 1980s is the Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) to water user associations (WUAs). In situations where top-down transfer occurred, the achievements have been limited. There is a modest increase in yield but gains in terms of cost recovery, efficiency, equity, etc., have not bee...

Implementation of integrated catchment management (ICM) is hampered by the lack of a conceptual framework for explaining how landowners select farming systems for their properties. Benefit–cost analysis (a procedure that estimates the costs and benefits of alternative actions or policies) has limitations in this regard, which might be overcome by u...

The Regional Forest Agreement process has dominated Australian forest policy for the past decade. The RFA process set in place a mechanism by which benchmark conservation values were established for forest ecosystems, whilst addressing the needs of the timber industry. The outcomes of a number of RFA's have been fraught with controversy. Key stakeh...

There has been substantial focus on water resource development in India, but with emphasis mainly on the technical side. Development of institutions to manage the interactions and arrangements necessary has received little attention. The study uses the new institutional economics framework and governance theories to probe local institutions in wate...

The Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) programme introduced in the 1990s, in Australia to protect environmental values, encourage job creation and growth and manage forests in an ecologically sustainable manner. Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques were used in this study to assess their potential for examining the RFA policy. The empiri...

b>Contents: 1. Role of multi-criteria decision making in natural resource management / Gamini Herath and Tony Prato 2. Analysis of forest policy using multi-attribute value theory / Jayanath Ananda and Gamini Herath 3. Comparing Riparian revegetation policy options using the analytic hierarchy process / M. E. Qureshi and S. R. Harrison 4. Managing...

We give semiparametric identification and estimation results for econometric models with a regressor that is endogenous, bound censored and selected,called a Tobin regressor. First, we show that true parameter value is set identified and characterize the identification sets. Second, we propose novel estimation and inference methods for this true va...

The accelerated use of agro-chemicals in Australia during the last two decades has generated major adverse effects on the environment. pollution of water courses and underground water aquifers by pesticides, weedicides and insecticides has become prominent.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of natural resources accounting in sustainable development. Natural resource accounting is important because the welfare of a nation measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) has several weaknesses. Design/methodology/approach This paper achieves this objective by identifying the pre...

Forest policy decisions inherently involve multiple attributes and risk and uncertainty as they largely deal with complex biological, ecological, and socio-political systems. Identifying risk preferences and quantifying their inter-relationships and tradeoffs are useful in formulating better forest policy. Often, technocrats and experts deal with r...

b>Purpose – The aim of this paper is to provide a critical evaluation of the potential of new institutional economics (NIE) in third world development. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews various theories under NIE from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. It then reviews the various definitions of institutions and show that ins...

The 1990s heralded a new era in forest policy in Australia with the introduction of The National Forest Policy Statement which provided a framework under which native forest resources would be protected whilst also permitting ecologically sustainable timber harvesting. However, the implementation of the statement through the Regional Forest Agreeme...

It is generally accepted that institutional problems have severely constrained development in many countries regardless of significant achievements in technology and other reforms. Both the Old and New Institutional Economics have relevance in understanding the lack of progress in many countries in Asia and Africa. Institutions generally refer to t...

This paper proposes a methodology for measuring community values towards Australian forest policy using chaos theory. The use of chaos theory within social sciences has been restricted due to chaos-based analysis requiring time-continuous data. Using scale-based data, iconographs are suggested as a method of dynamically representing community value...

Wetlands in Australia provide considerable ecological, economic, environmental and social benefits. However, the use of wetlands has been indiscriminate and significant damage to many Australian wetlands has occurred. During the last 150 years one third of the wetlands in Victoria have been lost. A conspicuous problem in wetland management is the p...

The Mount Buffalo National Park is the oldest national park in Victoria, Australia. There has been a rapid increase in the number of visitors to the park during the last decade and park management has been a concern, especially in the light of declining budgetary allocations and potential damage due to the increased visitor numbers. Policy options...

Soil erosion is the single most important environmental degradation problem in the developing world. Despite the plethora of literature that exists on the incidence, causes and impacts of soil erosion, a concrete understanding of this complex problem is lacking. This paper examines the soil erosion problem in developing countries in order to unders...

Forest management involves multiple objectives, multiple stakeholders, complex socio-ecological and political interactions. Public involvement in forest decision making is a challenging task that involves controversies. Various participatory tools such as public consultation forums, public comment processes, opinion polls are used to consult and to...

Forest management decisions are often characterised by complexity, irreversibility and uncertainty. Much of the complexity arises from the multiple-use nature of forest goods and services, difficulty in monetary valuation of ecological services and the involvement of numerous stakeholders. Under these circumstances, conventional methods such as cos...

Wilderness is a unique environmental resource that provides a multitude of use and non-use benefits. The use and management of wilderness depend on the assessment of wilderness quality. Current wilderness assessment in Australia is based on two broad criteria, the remoteness and naturalness of the wilderness, determined using geographic information...

Wilderness conservation has a checkered history in Australian politics. Initially, wilderness was protected in national parks, and specific areas or legislation did not exist. In the 1960s, wilderness conservation became an important issue in Australian politics. Pressure from environmental groups and the general public created several conflicts. S...

Tea has been Sri Lanka’s major export earner for several decades. However, soil erosion on tea‐producing land has had considerable on‐site and off‐site effects. This study quantifies soil erosion impacts for smallholder tea farms in Sri Lanka by estimating a yield damage function and an erosion damage function using a subjective elicitation techniq...

The role of commodity prices and subsidies on the adoption of soil conservation has been widely debated yet is poorly understood. One reason for this is the complex nature of the relationship between soil loss and yield damage. This paper examines the effects of price and subsidy policy on adoption of soil conservation measures in tea lands in Sri...

Soil erosion in developing countries is a widespread problem causing considerable economic damage. It still remains an intractable problem in many countries. Available research findings on costs of soil erosion indicate them to be high. Soil erosion continues to be a problem due to the difficulties of estimating the economic damages and attendant d...

Australia's national parks, nature reserves, and wilderness areas protect biodiversity and other ecosystem values while offering opportunities for ecotourism and recreation. Tourism and recreation demands have increased dramatically, while land managers struggle with inadequate staff and funds, thereby jeopar- dizing the economic and social value o...

The recreation values of Lake Mokoan in Victoria were estimated in this study using the travel cost method and the contingent valuation method. Data were collected for both methods by personal interviews and four different values were estimated using variants of TCM and CVM. The TCM gave smaller estimates of consumers' surplus over the CVM. There w...

Examines the economic factors that influenced chemical based agriculture in Australia and the adverse environmental effects of agrochemicals. Reports how technological change, government policies and institutions affected the environment through chemicals. Discusses the effectiveness of alternative policy measures in mitigating these adverse conseq...

Freshwater algal blooms have become an important water quality problem in Europe and Australia. Countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands have experienced severe algal blooms (Anabaena,Microcystisetc.). These have caused considerable losses in recreation opportunities, expenses to provide alternative water supplies and...

Algal blooms have become an important water quality problem in Australia. They are caused by excess phosphorus in waterways from point sources such as sewage treatment plants, cattle feedlots and non-point sources, mainly agriculture and animal industries. There is a need to economically control phosphorus inputs into the waterways. Sewage plants c...

Ecotourism is an important niche market in the world tourism industry. It is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to mass tourism. The emergence of ecotourism was facilitated by the environmental damage associated with mass tourism. Ecotourism is defined in many ways and there is no consensus as to its exact meaning. However, a number of...

Considerable growth has been achieved in agricultural production, specifically in export crops in developing countries over the last few decades. However, now there are concerns that production growth may not be sustainable under current agricultural practices. One of the primary sustainability concerns in Sri Lanka, is that of productivity decline...

This paper discusses algal blooms in waterways from an externality perspective. Algal activity is directly related to phosphorus intake, but this can vary by season and by degree of dilution. Policy alternatives, including property rights, taxes, tradeable permits and water pricing are discussed. Issues relating to detergent control and technologic...

The arguments in favour of subsidized and liberalised interest rates in rural credit markets can be attributed to incorrect understanding of the workings of rural credit markets. These markets are characterised by transactions costs, information costs, information asymmetry, moral hazards and adverse selection. Informal credit markets were able to...

The working papers are a series of manuscripts in their draft form. Please do not quote without obtaining the author's consent as these works are in their draft form. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not necessarily endorsed by the School or IBISWorld Pty Ltd.

The working papers are a series of manuscripts in their draft form. Please do not quote without obtaining the author's consent as these works are in their draft form. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not necessarily endorsed by the School.

Many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have turned over irrigation systems to farmer groups. There is general consensus that neoclassical economics has failed to address many issues in irrigation water management. Institutional issues have been at the heart of some of these failures. The New Institutional Economics (NIE) has been used by...