Air pollution from vehicular traffic is a major source of health damage in urban areas. The problems of urban traffic and pollution are essentially geographic, because their incidence and impacts depend on the spatial distribution of economic activities, households, and transport links. This...

As in many countries around the world, subsidies to energy in Bangladesh impose a significant fiscal burden, with benefits that disproportionately accrue to high-income households. Any reforms of energy subsidies should benefit the overall economy rather than those who use energy the most. Using...

The authors try to identify the determinants of private, community-based provision of a public good - in this case, trash collection. Using survey data for Dhaka, Bangladesh, where some neighborhoods have successfully organized an alternative to the municipal trash collection service, they...

The author assesses the importance of the regulatory framework as a determinant of private sector investment in infrastructure. She uses recently compiled data on private and public sector investment in the water, power, telecommunications, railroads, and roads sectors between 1980 and 1998 in...

Road construction has often been viewed as the precursor to deforestation, especially in tropical forests. Traditional responses to such threats have been reactive, with attempts to mitigate impacts through physical measures, or the establishment of protected areas. These approaches often have...

The World Health Organization attributes about 3.3 million annual premature deaths to outdoor air pollution in low- and middle-income countries. Comprehensive pollution monitoring in urban areas has been too costly for many developing countries; yet sparse information has hindered cost-effective...

A model of Covid-19 transmission among locations within a country has been developed that is (1) implementable anywhere spatially-disaggregated Covid-19 infection data are available; (2) scalable for locations of different sizes, from individual regions to countries of continental scale; (3)...

Research on the determinants of collective action in the commons generally focuses on interest-group heterogeneity, implicitly assuming that groups perceive the same problems but have different priorities. This paper changes the focus to the role played by perceptions themselves. Within...

Using recent Demographic Health Survey data for Bangladesh and the neighboring Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, this paper reexamines the determinants of child wasting and maternal anemia. The findings bear out the importance of commonly cited factors, such as mother’s...

This paper develops and applies a spatial econometric model that links road upgrading to forest clearing and biodiversity loss in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The paper uses 500-meter cells to estimate the relationship between the rate of forest clearing in a cell and its distance to...