Article 13 of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, known as the "Peace Clause," precludes most WTO dispute settlement challenges against a country that is complying with the Agreement's liberalization commitments - until 1 January 2004, when the Peace Clause will expire. This article evaluates the...

We show that grandfathering fishing rights to local users or recognizing first possessions is more dynamically efficient than auctions of such rights. It is often argued that auctions allocate rights to the highest-valued users and thereby maximize resource rents. We counter that rents are not...

In this paper we build up the analysis of La Porta et al. (1998), to investigate the importance of legal families in explaining the variations in pollution emissions in different countries. The main intuition behind our analysis is that the nations in which the rights of shareholders are more...

Does economic growth affect the likelihood of civil war? Answering this question requires dealing with reverse causation. Our approach exploits that international commodity prices have a significant effect on the income growth of Sub-Saharan African countries. We show that lower income growth...

This paper investigates the world economic implications of climate change policy strategies, especially the evaluation of impacts by an implementation of Clean Development Mechanisms, Joint Implementation and Emissions trading with a world integrated assessment model. Of special interest in this...

The Brundtland Commission has introduced a critical new dimension into our conception of economic development by raising the issue of sustainability of development. This definition determines intra- and intergenerational justice as principles for sustainable development. Universal access to...

This paper articulates the necessity of emphasizing the absolute level of environmental degradation in different countries as a guide to understanding the links between such degradation and economic development. We argue the case for developing a composite environmental degradation index (EDI)...

More than forty states worldwide currently pursue explicit political strategies to expand and promote their bioeconomies. This paper assesses these strategies in the context of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our theoretical framework differentiates between four pathways of...

We produce novel empirical evidence on the relevance of temperature volatility shocks for the dynamics of macro aggregates and asset prices. Using two centuries of UK temperature data, we document that the relationship between temperature volatility and the macroeconomy varies over time. First,...

The relationship between economic growth and the environment is, and will always remain, controversial. Some see the emergence of new pollution problems, the lack of success in dealing with global warming and the still rising population in the Third World as proof positive that humans are a...