Malawi, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe depend heavily on export earnings from a narrow base of agricultural commodities (coffee, cotton, sugar, tea, and tobacco). This dependence increased between 1961 - 1973 and 1974 - 1987, when international prices for those commodities were declining and unstable....

Most OECD countries have committed themselves to stabilizing their carbon emission at 1990 levels by the year 2000, and some to reducing emissions to 80-90 percent of 1990 levels by the years 2005 and 2010. Most non-OECD countries are reluctant to reduce emissions to combat global climate...

Larsen and Shah present evidence on the level of fossil fuel subsidies and their implications for carbon dioxide emissions. They conclude that substantial fossil fuel subsidies prevail in a handful of large, carbon-emitting countries. Removing such subsidies could substantially reduce national...

The author presents a simple empirical framework for estimating the level of world fossil fuel subsidies and analyzing their implications for carbon dioxide emissions. The author extends Larsen and Shah (1992) by applying a simple model with interfuel substitution, using a more detailed sectoral...

The authors evaluate the case for carbon taxes in terms of national interests. They reach the following conclusions. (A) A global carbon tax involves issues of international resource transfers and would be difficult to administer and enforce. It is thus unlikely to be implemented in the near...

Program administrators are often faced with the difficult problem of allocating scarce resources among regions in a country when interventions are aimed at addressing multiple objectives. One main concern is the tradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement of environmental quality. To...

The author's model demonstrates that when imports are predominantly intermediate inputs - as they are in most developing countries - import restrictions can not always be relied upon to improve the trade balance. Such restrictions act as a supply shock to the economy. Unless nontraded goods are...

Broad comparisons show that growth is linked to imports, but country coomparisons over short periods show the link to be more flexible than fixed. In these stringent times, the big question for African countries is whether they can reduce their historically high import dependence? Or put...