Forest and Ecology Grants: Way Ahead for the 16th Finance Commission

Aniket Bhatkhande and Abhay Pethe

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Climate change is dominating risk analysis across governments and businesses and biodiversity conservation is critical mitigation against it. India through the Forest and Ecology grant has the world’s largest Ecological Fiscal Transfer. As the 16th Finance Commission deliberates it can consider the availability of newer datasets as well as past performance of the grant. We appeal to integration of three principles: Fairness and Equity, Ring-Fencing and Additionality, and Incentivizing Performance. We argue for a more inclusive definition of forest and ecology to include diverse ecosystems like grasslands and deserts. Secondly, we present evidence that communities around ecosystem bear the cost of regulation and thus argue for a separate grant-in-aid for communities around the ecosystems extending the opportunity cost principle to the third tier of governments. Lastly for incentivizing performance we recommend a grant-in-aid for the forest departments of the states who are responsible for maintenance and preservation of these ecosystems.

Keywords: Ecological Economics; Environmental Fiscal Federalism; Ecological Fiscal Transfer; Indian Finance Commissions; Third-tier Governments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H5 H7 H77 Q23 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/123440/1/MPRA_paper_123440.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:123440

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().