The following paper examines the main factors determining long-run agricultural land expansion in Latin America compared to other tropical regions. Given the importance of natural resource-based sectors for most economies in Latin America, the impact of price-induced "resource booms" on economic...

Economics now recognize that, along with physical and human capital, environmental resources should be viewed as important economic assets, which can be called natural capital. Three recent debates have emerged over the role of natural capital in economic development. First, as many ecological...

We use childhood exposure to the series of disasters from 1970 to 1974 in Bangladesh, the 1970 cyclone, the 1971 war and the 1974 famine, as a natural experiment inducing variations in the adulthood outcomes. Based on an overlapping generation model, we hypothesize that children from households...

We examine inequality convergence over the past three decades and ask if environmentally related impacts on health, and their effect on human capital, are responsible for the slow rate of inequality reduction in countries. Though higher initial incidence of environmentally related impacts on...

This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the impact of the structural adjustment program (SAP) on forest loss in Ghana between the period 1965-95. An optimal control model is used to derive estimable reduced form equations for forest loss, cocoa land, maize land and timber...

Tropical deforestation is generally characterized as conversion of forest land to alternative uses, notably agriculture. This would suggest the need for rational decision making concerning the optimal allocation of tropical forest land between competing uses. The following paper explores this...

Recent studies have suggested that tropical wetland systems may have a crucial economic role to play in development. The following paper provides an overview of these benefits, using the general framework of cost-benefit analysis as the methodological approach to assessing wetland values. An...

We combine a new economic geography model of agglomeration and dispersion of economic activity with an ecological-economic model of species diversity to examine optimal policies of biodiversity conservation in a two-region world. Species diversity is inevitably impaired by anthropogenic impact....

As the world recovers from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the international community should promote a mix of policies to sustain this global recovery and create jobs through reducing carbon dependency, ecological degradation and poverty. Such a Global Green New Deal...