There are large volumes of gas offshore Tanzania, which has raised hopes of a boom. But those hopes look set to be disappointed. A boom would depend on there being a sizeable flow of revenue to government from producing and exporting gas. This paper sets out the scale of the gas, and the array...

A significant natural resource discovery creates excited popular expectations of imminent wealth. But the size of a boom is usually overestimated and the delay in receiving revenues is underestimated. This paper takes stock of the sequencing, timing, and scale of the development of a natural...

Are natural resources a 'curse' or a 'blessing'? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal capacity in resourcerich contexts. This paper...

This paper starts out from the optimistic assumption that the basic policies for environmental economic development are known but uncertainties surround the speed of their adoption. In many developing countries the key obstacle is poor governance: consequently, renewable resources continue to be...

Economics for managing our depleting resources and biodiversity is imperative part of development, more so since sustainable development has been placed on the prime platform for future sustenance of the planet. Sustainable development is at the heart of policy initiatives due to intensive...

For several decades, the international community has aspired to integrate the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Yet, no country has achieved the patterns of consumption and production that could sustain global prosperity in the coming decades. Thus, with the...

The Climate Change debate has drawn attention to the problem of greenhouse gases emissions into the atmosphere. One of the most important issues in the policy debate is the role that should be played by developing countries in joining the commitment of developed countries to reduce GHG...

The number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced-form relationship between a country economic growth and the quantity of pollutants produced in the process has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence pointing to an inverted-U...

The efforts of international financial institutions such as the World Bank to support countries in the effective capture and use of revenues from extractive industries have focused increasingly on transparency, notably through the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. In this article,...