Environmental conditional cash transfers, or "payments for ecosystem services" are a centerpiece of global efforts to protect biodiversity, safeguard watersheds, and mitigate climate change by reducing forest loss. This paper evaluates the impacts of Mexico's national payments for ecosystem...

This paper uses simple analytical models to study high-income donor countries' willingness to pay to supply mitigation finance to low-income countries; how this depends on modality for finance supply; and how it changes as the global greenhouse gas mitigation agenda moves forward. The paper...

This paper surveys the recent literature exploring the causes of urban pollution in the developing world and the implications of such pollution for a city's competitiveness. Within a system of cities, cities compete for jobs and people. Those cities that specialize in heavy industrial activity...

This paper revisits the issue of environment and development raised in the 1992 World Development Report, with new analysis tools and data. The paper discusses inference and interpretation in a machine learning framework. The results suggest that production gradually favors conserving the...

On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced the United States' withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change. Despite this decision, American firms continued investing in low-carbon technologies and some states committed to tougher environmental standards. To understand this apparent...

To finance the transition to low-carbon economies required to mitigate climate change, countries are increasingly using a combination of carbon pricing and green bonds. This paper studies the reasoning behind such policy mixes and the economic interaction effects that result from these different...

This handbook has been developed to provide instruction on the design and implementation of incentives for resource-efficiency purposes. The target audience is World Bank staff and stakeholders who are supporting the implementation of a resource-efficiency program in a country on behalf of the...

This assessment presents a synthesis of analysis to contribute to the definition of a lower carbon and greener growth path for Romania to 2050. The objective of Romania's green growth path is to implement mitigation actions and undertake needed adaptation while preserving growth and employment....

The objective of the Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) is to assess the adequacy and performance of the policy, legal, and institutional framework for environmental management in Ukraine, in light of the decentralization process of environmental governance and wider reform objectives, and to...

In 2001, FYR Macedonia embarked on a new education policy agenda. One of the goals of this agenda was to improve the country's student assessment system. In order to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of its existing assessment system, FYR Macedonia decided to benchmark...