The political accord struck by world leaders at the United Nations negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009 allows participating countries to express their greenhouse gas commitments in a variety of ways. For example, developed countries promised different percent emissions reductions...

For the foreseeable future, climate change policy will be considerably more stringent in some countries than in others. Indeed, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change explicitly states that developed countries must take meaningful action before any obligations are to be placed...

The world is in the midst of a significant demographic transition with important implications for the macroeconomic performance of the global economy. This paper summarizes the key features of the current and projected future demographic change that are likely to have macroeconomic effects. It...

Since the 1997-98 financial crisis, many East Asian economies have experienced permanent declines of domestic investment and output growth, mainly resulting from the increase in financial risk and decrease in the return on investment. The investment decline in East Asia, outside of China,...

To succeed in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, a climate policy must establish credible long-term incentives for investments in the new energy-sector capital and in research and development. We argue that credibility implies that international agreements should focus on enhancing coordination...

The notion of "convergence" of economic variables across countries is a useful concept and in the case of income per capita, a well studied area. If there is empirical evidence of convergence of some economic variables across countries, then our ability to prdict the future (or at least...

The world is in the midst of a significant demographic transition with important implications for the macroeconomic performance of the global economy. This paper summarizes the key features of the current and projected future demographic change that are likely to have macroeconomic effects. It...

This paper is a revised version of a paper that was originally presented to the Asian Economic Panel meeting held in Tokyo, May 11-12, 2003 and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) Finance forum, Hua Hin, Thailand, July 8-9, 2003. We have updated that original paper to include the...