This working paper is being published with the objective of contributing to the debate on a topic of importance to the region, and to elicit comments and suggestions from interested parties. This paper has not undergone consideration by the SDS Management Team. As such, it does not reflect the...

Recent debates on how to provide electricity to the roughly one billion still unconnected people in developing countries have identified mini-grids as a promising way forward. High upfront costs of transmission lines are avoided, and unlike home-scale solar, mini-grids can provide sufficient...

In their 1963 classic Scarcity and Growth Howard Barnett and Chandler Morse argued that resource scarcity did not threaten economic growth. A second investigation in the late 1970s, Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered, reached largely the same conclusion. The 25 years since that work was published...

Environmental policymakers must address the adverse effects of a number of pollutants that accumulate in the environment. Goals for the regulation of these damages often involve holding long-term emissions below a level deemed to be "dangerous", or outright banning of offending products or...

Concern about sustainability helped to launch a new agenda for development and environmental economics and challenged many of the fundamental goals and assumptions of the conventional, neoclassical economics of growth and development. We review 25 years' of refereed journal articles on the...