We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...

This report constitutes the first deliverable of the project ENGIME - Economic Growth and Innovation in Multicultural Environments, financed by the European Commission - FP5 - Key Action: Improving socio-economic knowledge base. Contract HPSE-CT2001-50007

Although developing countries face a drastic increase in their greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation actions against climate change do not rank high among their priorities. The obvious reason lies in the necessity for them to continue the development process, which is characterised by pressing...

The relationship between economic growth and pollution is very complex, depending upon a host of different factors. Thus the study of this phenomenon represents a challenging endeavor. While most economics papers begin with theory and support that theory with econometric evidence, the literature...

Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....

Environmental policy affects the distribution of market shares if intermediate goods are differentiated in pollution intensity. When innovations are environmental friendly, a tax on emissions skews demand towards new goods, which are the most productive. In this case along a balanced growth path...

In recent years, extensive literature on the Environmental Kuznets Curve leading to optimistic policy conclusions has attracted great attention. However, the underlying cross-section estimations are not very reliable. Accordingly, this contribution uses time series data for a single country with...

In 2000s, Russia entered the second round of radical reforms of its economic and political system. These changes affect the institutions of the macro- and microeconomic policy, of the energy policy, as well as the institutions of the climate policy. Thus, the framework is currently being built...

There has been a recent economic literature arguing that international environmental agreements (IEAs) can have no real effect, on account of their voluntary and self-enforcing nature. This literature concludes that the terms of IEAs are the codification of the noncooperative equilibrium, and...

Latin American countries have always been characterised by relatively high levels of income inequality, even taking into account their degree of economic development. If such 'excess inequality' is combined with the fact that these are mostly middle-income and low-income countries, it can be...