Part I: The material basis of the economy and resource productivity. Natural resources: the material basis of the economy -- An evolving economic context and new environmental challenges -- Sustainable resource use and resource productivity -- The material basis of the global economy -- The...

It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle has been borne out in some econometric tests of the determinants of economic performance...

The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence...

What have we learned from the outpouring of literature as a result of the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change? A lot. We have explored the model space and the parameter space much more thoroughly, though there are still unexplored regions. While there are aspects of the Stern...

The "fairness" of negotiations between countries and resource extracting firms is subject to many accusations and counter-accusations and may be argued, in many instances, to impact the subsequent economic benefit to a host country from extraction. This paper examines the role of host country...

One of the surprising features of modern economic growth is that economies with abundant natural resources have tended to grow less rapidly than natural-resource-scarce economies. In this paper we show that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1971 (the base year)...

Improving resource productivity and ensuring a sustainable resource and materials management building on the principle of the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) is a central element of green growth policies. It helps to improve the environment, by reducing the amount of resources that the economy...

This report presents global projections of materials use and their environmental consequences, providing a quantitative outlook to 2060 at the global, sectoral and regional levels for 61 different materials (biomass resources, fossil fuels, metals and non-metallic minerals). It explains the...

This paper highlights the importance of natural resource concentration and ethnic group regional concentration for ethnic conflict. A new type of bargaining failure due to multiple types of potential conflicts (and hence multiple threat points) is identified. The theory predicts war to be more...