How has environment mattered for the World Bank? The aggregate figures suggest that it has mattered a great deal, since the Bank's total environmental lending has exceeded $US 9 billion over the past six years. In this paper the authors use newly available data to address a more precise version...

The authors call for a revised model for the regulation of industrial pollution. They think the traditional emphasis on appropriate instruments, while ultimately correct, is premature, because agencies in most developing countries have insufficient information and burdensome transaction costs to...

Environmental degradation can inflict serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods often depend on natural resource use and their living conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained options may induce the poor to...

Program administrators are often faced with the difficult problem of allocating scarce resources among regions in a country when interventions are aimed at addressing multiple objectives. One main concern is the tradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement of environmental quality. To...

As the wild tiger population in tropical Asia dropped from about 100,000 to 3,500 in the last century, the need to conserve tiger habitats poses a challenge for the Global Tiger Recovery Program. This paper develops and uses a high-resolution monthly forest clearing database for 74 tiger habitat...

Over two decades, the World Bank has undertaken many structural adjustment operations withgovernments of developing countries. During negotiations for structural adjustment loans (SALs), partner governments agree to specific policy reforms, whose implementation becomes a condition for...

Several previous studies have asked whether environmental controls imposed in the industrial economies are diverting investments in pollution-intensive activities off-shore. Broadly, these studies conclude that direct investment does not appear to be stimulated by such regulations, partly...

The authors develop comparative indices of environmental policy and performance for 31 countries using a quantified analysis of reports prepared for the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development. In cross-country regressions, they find a very strong, continuous association...

Most discussions of the digital divide treat it as a"North-South"issue, but the conventional dichotomy doesn't applyto cell phones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although almost all Sub-Saharan countries are poor by international standards, they exhibit great disparities in coverage by cell telephone...

Rapid growth of Internet use in high-income economies, has raised the specter of a"digital divide"that will marginalize developing countries, because they can neither afford Internet access, nor use it effectively when it is available. Using a new cross-country data set, the authors investigate...