Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once environmental degradation becomes too severe, regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in general purpose technology and...

What explains the economic success of Mauritius, a top performer among African countries? How did it develop a manufacturing sector and how has it managed to respond well to new external shocks? This paper draws on the history of the island, the writings of foreign economists, the ideas of...

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) has been the dominant approach among economists to modeling aggregate pollution emissions and ambient pollution concentrations over the last quarter century. Despite this, the EKC was criticized almost from the start and decomposition approaches have been...

This review develops an integrated baseline model to assess the trade-offs between the natural environment and economic growth. Consumption growth is considered in terms of both welfare and sustainability. The framework features capital accumulation and the sectoral structure of the economy as...

This is the first paper to use U.S. state-level data to econometrically assess education’s role in an environmental Kuznets curve setting. The empirical analysis involves testing several models to evaluate the impact of education on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy consumption and...

This paper investigates the short-run effects of economic growth on carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and the manufacture of cement for 189 countries over the period 1961-2010. Contrary to what has previously been reported, we conclude that there is no strong evidence...

What is the effect of trade on a country's environment, for a given level of GDP? Some have observed an apparent positive correlation between openness to trade and measures of environmental quality. But this could be due to endogeneity of trade, rather than causality. This paper uses exogenous...

This work estimates financial development to energy poverty correlation in Latin America through the entropy method, the Principal Component Analysis, and an econometric analysis from 1990 to 2018. The PCA analysis reveals financial development and foreign direct investment as the key variables...

This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The twentieth century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world,...