Economic damage from natural hazards can sometimes be prevented and always mitigated. However, private individuals tend to underinvest in such measures due to problems of collective action, information asymmetry and myopic behavior. Governments, which can in principle correct these market...

The Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change is one of the few cost-benefit analyses of climate change to come out in favour of immediate and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The choice of a low discount rate is the main reason for the Review’s divergence in...

This paper aspires to argue in favour of a simple, but fundamental, hypothesis. This hypothesis is that economic growth is neither the cause of nor the solution to environmental problems and that therefore both anti-growth environmentalists and pro-growth neoclassical environmental economists...

Famine mortality is preventable by government action and yet some famines kill. Amartya Sen has famously stated that no famine with significant excess mortality has ever occurred in a democracy. Yet, critics have argued that some countries have experienced famine mortality despite democratic...

While a number of different theoretical models have been advanced to explain why states implement—or, indeed, do not implement—multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), very little empirical work has been undertaken to validate their predictions. With a view to narrowing this gap, the...

Some Neo-Malthusians and anti-immigration groups in the United States have recently argued that migration of people to developed countries is damaging to sustainable development and environmental protection. This paper argues that it is inappropriate and ethically indefensible to employ...

Genuine saving measures net investment in produced, natural and human capital. It is a necessary condition for weak sustainable development that genuine saving not be persistently negative. However, according to data provided by the World Bank, resource-rich countries are systematically failing...

Climate change is likely to lead to an increase in the frequency and/or intensity of certain types of natural hazards, if not globally, then at least in certain regions. All other things equal, this should lead to an increase in the economic toll from natural disasters over time. Yet, all other...