The authors explore the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality by analyzing patterns of environmental transformation for countries at different income levels. They look at how eight indicators of environmental quality evolve in response to economic growth and policies...

Environmental degradation can inflict serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods often depend on natural resource use and their living conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained options may induce the poor to...

This paper analyzes the determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. From a model of optimal use, it derives and then estimates a deforestation equation on county-level data for the period 1978 to 1988. The data include a deforestation measure from satellite images, which is a great...

Municipal solid waste management continues to be a major challenge for local governments in both urban and rural areas across the world, and one of the key issues is their financial constraints. Recently an economic analysis was conducted in Eryuan, a poor county located in Yunnan Province of...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is an offset mechanism designed to reduce the overall cost of implementing a given global target for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in industrialized"Annex B"countries of the Kyoto Protocol. This paper discusses various ways in which CDM projects do not...

Little evidence exists on the distribution across countries of toxic releases by manufacturing, or on how those patterns change through time. A number of studies have asked whether environmental controls imposed in the industrialized economies are diverting investments in pollution-intensive...

Despite massive oil rent incomes since the early 1970s, the economic performance of oil-exporting countries-with notable exceptions-is poor. While there is extensive literature on the management of oil resources, analysis of the underlying political determinants of this poor performance is more...

Risk shifting and incomplete contracting lie at the heart of the agency relationship inherent in the procurement and financing of large-scale projects such as power plants, oil and gas pipelines, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities. Resolving this agency problem is critical in structuring...

Since the early 1990s, substantial resources and efforts have been spent on implementing market-oriented electricity reforms in developing countries. While there are important sectoral, economic, and social dimensions involved in electricity reform, empirical analysis and evaluation of reforms...

Rural roads promote economic development but also facilitate deforestation. To explore the tradeoffs between development and environmental damage posed by road building, the authors develop and estimate a spatially explicit model of land use. This model takes into account location and land...