The clearing of forests for agricultural land and other marketable purposes is a well-trodden path of economic development. With these private benefits from deforestation come external costs: emissions from deforestation currently account for 12 per cent of global carbon emissions. A widespread...

While high fertility persists in the poorest countries and fertility declines with per capita income in developing countries, fertility and per capita income are now positively associated across most developed countries. This paper presents a model where a Ushaped relationship between overall...

[1] Household survey data for ten countries are used to quantify and test the importance of price and non-price factors on residential water demand and investigate complementarities between household water-saving behaviors and the average volumetric price of water. Results show: (1) the average...

Using data for 160 countries for the period 1963-2001, this paper examines the short-run relationship between economic growth and changes in national leader. To address the potential endogeneity of economic growth, I use exogenous variation in commodity export prices, export partner incomes,...

The paper focuses on establishing causation in regression analysis in observational settings. Simple static regression analysis cannot establish causality in the absence of a priori theory on possible causal mechanisms or controlled and randomized experiments. However, two regression based...

The aim of this study is to measure and understand the long-term factors behind trends in energy and carbon intensity in different economies. It also looks at how improvements in energy efficiency are spread to countries around the world. Of particular interest is the rate at which efficiency...

The end of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka in 2009 generated widespread expectations of a period of sustained economic growth, building on the achievements of the liberalisation reforms sustained over three previous decades. However, recent developments have dampened that optimism, rekindling...

This paper investigates the relationship between tariff and growth in the Australian economy over the period from 1871 to 2002. The study is motivated by the debate on the apparent 'tariff-growth paradox', a sign switch in the link between tariff rate and growth between the first and second...

International pressure to revalue China’s currency stems in part from the expectation that rapid economic growth should be associated with an underlying real exchange rate appreciation. This hinges on the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis, which sees growth as stemming from improvements in traded...

This paper presents long-term estimates of gross fixed capital formation for 1951-2007 that are disaggregated by categories of productive assets. These data, combined with approximations of probable average asset lives and a feasible asset retirement method are used in a Perpetual Inventory...