The economic case for trade liberalization rests on its capacity to extend the reach of the market's fabled invisible hand. With the globalization of the market, however, comes a globalization of market failures arising from the fact that prices do not to capture 'external' costs and benefits to...

Globalization – viewed as a process of economic integration that embraces governance as well as markets – could lead to worldwide convergence toward higher or lower environmental quality, or to environmental polarization in which the ‘greening’ of the global North is accompanied by the...

In the wake of violent conflict, a key element of building a durable peace is building a state with the ability to collect and manage public resources. To implement peace accords and provide public services, the government must be able to collect revenue, allocate resources, and manage...

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial...

When the United States puts a cap on carbon emissions as part of the effort to address the problem of global climate change, this will increase the prices of fossil fuels, significantly impacting not only consumers but also local, state, and federal governments. Consumers can be “made...

This new environmental justice study, (co-authored by PERI’s James Boyce, Michael Ash, & Grace Chang, along with Manuel Pastor, Justin Scoggins, & Jennifer Tran of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California) examines not only who receives the...

This paper utilizes the Russian Statistical Agency's data on air pollution in Russia to analyze the impact of economic inequalities among Russia's regions on environmental degradation. Controlling for the absolute level of income, we find that regions with lower incomes relative to those of...

The introduction of carbon charges on the use of fossil fuels in China would have a progressive impact on income distribution. This outcome, which contrasts to the regressive distributional impact found in most studies of carbon charges in industrialized countries, is driven primarily by...

Land reform, equitable distribution, economic development, environmental quality, land reform strategies, Brazil, Landless Workers’ Movement, East Asia, rural poverty, land productivity, sustainable agriculture, comparative advantage, small farms.

Small farms play a crucial role in conserving the agricultural biodiversity that underpins long-term food security worldwide. Particularly in centers of crop genetic diversity – such as Mesoamerica in the case of maize (corn) and the Andean region in the case of potatoes – small farmers are...