Why are we rich and others poor? What is preventing the less-developed countries from catching up with the more developed? How did we become rich? Underlying these questions are more fundamental ones: What is the nature of economic progress? What are its causes? I seek the answers to these...

Chapter 1 of this report reviews a number of approaches to conceptualize and operationalize biophysical constraints for economic performance. The starting point is a scoping study by Cambridge Econometrics and Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI) that reviews a large number of...

I summarize the main results and policy insights from the 2011 EIB Conference on “Productivity and Long-Term Growth Potential in Europe.” Europe's need for productivity growth has become more pressing against the backdrop of huge government debt and a beginning slowdown in labour supply. The...

Energy efficiency and decarbonization are important elements of climate change mitigation. We draw on European mitigation scenarios from the EMF28 modeling exercise to decompose economy-wide and sectoral emissions into their main components. We utilize the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI)...