Essays on energy demand and renewable natural resource management

Abstract: This thesis is a collection of five self-contained papers in the area of energy demand and renewable natural resource management. Paper 1 analyzes the dynamics in cooking fuel choices among Ghanaian households over the period 2005 and 2013 and further investigate the main forces driving households’ choice of cooking fuel. Evidence from this paper reveals a significant transition from fuelwood use towards LPG over the period. Results also reveal factors such as price, reliability in supply of LPG, income and other household attributes as significant factors influencing households’ choice of a given energy type for cooking. Paper 2 investigates the long and short run demand drivers of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in Ghana and presents a 10-year forecast of future trends in demand. Results identify income, price and urbanization as the main drivers of demand. Projections from three scenarios suggest that demand for LPG will reach a minimum of 5.9 million metric tons by the year 2022. Paper 3 examines the causal dynamics among energy use, real GDP and CO₂ emissions in the presence of regime shifts in six emerging African economies. Results confirm the presence of regime shift effects in the long run inter-linkages among energy use, real GDP and CO₂ emissions in the countries considered. This suggests that structural shifts have both economic and environmental effects. Paper 4 develops a stage-structured bioeconomic model to analyze the effects of interspecies competition between roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and fallow deer (Dama dama) on net present value of harvesting, and the associated harvesting strategies. Our analysis shows that unilateral interspecies competition of the fallow deer on the roe deer reduces the marginal benefit of holding an additional individual of both species. Our numerical calculations suggest interspecies competition has a small impact on total net present value, compared to the impact on roe deer population density. Results are also sensitive to assumptions made about trophy prices and discount rate. Inclusion of trophy benefits implies reduced harvest of both young males and females. For the fallow deer, pulse harvesting is optimal, whereas this is not the case for roe deer. Paper 5 presents an analysis of the hunting lease market in Sweden. The determinants of hunting lease prices are analyzed using spatial and non-spatial hedonic price models. From the hedonic model, the associated hunting values are also derived. Results from the paper suggest the presence of spatial spillovers in lease prices. It also indicate factors such as proximity to urban centers, income, size of the hunting field, and congestion cost as key drivers of hunting lease prices. Further, the results indicate high hunting values for moose and fallow deer.