The purpose of this paper is to understand the long run demand for energy-related environmental quality, its influence on legislation and on transitions to low polluting energy sources. It starts by presenting a simple framework of the relationship between the demand for and supply of...

Throughout history, technological development and economic growth has led to greater prosperity and overall standard of living for many people in society. However, along with the benefits of economic development comes the social responsibility of minimizing the mortality and morbidity health...

This paper considers how energy-related external costs change through time. It focuses on one of the key periods in the history of energy. After a period of declining coal prices and soaring consumption which fuelled the Second Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth century British economy was...

Throughout history, technological development and economic growth has led to greater prosperity and overall standard of living for many people in society. However, along with the benefits of economic development comes the social responsibility of minimizing the mortality and morbidity health...

In this paper, I use an 18-year long panel data set of maize yields and high resolution weather data at the municipality level in Mexico to shed light on the differentiated effects that climate change may have in rainfed and irrigated agriculture. I find that rainfed maize is sensitive to both...

At the recent UN climate change conference in Bali, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for a revolutionary change in the world’s energy mix to minimize the risk of catastrophic global heating. This paper explores the implications for the World Bank and other donor institutions, employing...

This paper provides a detailed description and assessment of CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action), a database that reports CO2 emissions from the power sector. We built CARMA to assist the millions of concerned global citizens who can act to reduce carbon emissions once they have timely,...

How do markets respond to extreme rainfall in West Africa? This paper examines the effect of weather on grain market performance in Niger, a country increasingly affected by drought and severe food crises over the past two decades. Using a dataset that combines information on rainfall,...

Among climate scientists, there is no longer any serious debate about whether greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are altering the earth’s climate. There is also a broad consensus on two issues related to reducing emissions. First, developing countries must be full participants in...

A climate crisis is inevitable unless developing countries limit carbon emissions from the power sector in the near future. This will happen only if the costs of lowcarbon power production become competitive with fossil fuel power. We focus on a leading candidate for investment: solar thermal or...