Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question the authors extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations,...

Melaka State, situated roughly halfway between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, has unique importance in the global dialogue around the sustainability of our shared urban future. At Melaka's heart is its historic urban center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) strategically located along the Strait...

This report is organized in four sections. Section one provides an overview of the context in which many ECA cities consolidated. This section includes a review of the key factors that shaped the urban systems of ECA, including a discussion of the implication of urbanizing under planned...

The Myanmar hydropower sector, in the early stages of development, has the opportunity to develop sustainably by balancing electricity generation with environmental and social outcomes. The country is currently following a conventional hydropower development process, with individual projects...

Rapid urbanization and overconsumption can threaten the natural environment, resource efficiency and resilience of a region, which are essential components of urban sustainability. Human effects which cause environmental degradation include poor sanitation and waste disposal, overconsumption of...

Myanmar has relied heavily on natural resource exploitation to sustain economic growth, and serious environmental issues are emerging, underlining the importance of transparent and robust Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) system. There are growing concerns around the impacts of the...

The urgency of addressing Pakistan's environmental problems has probably never been greater. Conservative estimates presented in this report suggest that environmental degradation costs the country at least 6 percent of GDP, or about Rs. 365 billion per year, and these costs fall...

A rainforest can be modeled as a dynamic asset subject to various risks, including risk of fire. Any small part of the forest can be in one of two states: either untouched by forest fire, or already damaged by fire, in which case there is both a local forest loss and increased dryness over a...

What is the utility from obtaining more precise values of natural resource objects (rainforests), through surveys or other similar information gathering? In the value of information problems studied here, a principal who wishes to preserve a resource sets a price to offer to a seller without...

The primary objective of the Southern Gobi Regional Environmental Assessment (REA) is to provide guidance for sustainable management of environmental resources in the future development of the Southern Gobi Region (SGR), development that will be led by rapid expansion of mining. The REA defines...