Most natural resources that are used in production are non-renewable. When they become depleted they are lost for future use. Does it follow that the limited availability of natural resources will at some time in the future constrain economic growth as many environmentalists believe? While...

This article critically assesses three links on how trade might harm the environment. First, trade liberalisation might exacerbate existing levels of resource depletion and en-vironmental pollution. Second, open borders might allow companies to migrate to ‘pol-lution havens', thus undermining...

This article analyses which factors determine the allocation of debt forgiveness. In particular, it is examined what role various aspects of governance play. The results indicate that countries' need is a powerful determinant for debt forgiveness, whereas creditors' political interest is not,...

This article puts forward a number of arguments why trade openness might promote multilateral environmental cooperation. Most of these arguments are grounded in the substantive self-interest of the trading country. It tests the proposition using a range of proxy variables for general trade...

This article discusses whether the Treaty establishing the European Community (TEU) is actually more environmentally friendly than the WTO agreements and whether it can provide a role model for greening the WTO agreements. It analyses whether European Union (EU) member states have greater leeway...

This paper proposes to qualify a country's human development as potentially unsustainable if the net depreciation of its manufactured and natural capital stock is bigger than its investment. Linking the Human Development Index with sustainability in this way would allow the United Nations...

We augment the increasingly common practice of typically ad hoc robustness tests into a research methodology that allows reliable inferences when researchers do not know the true data-generating process. We identify three principal sources of model uncertainty. First, theories simplify and aim...

Existing accounts of counterterrorist policies posit that defensively oriented measures create negative externalities and result in regulatory competition inducing governments to increasingly tighten their policies. We argue that rather than causing an unconditional global ‘race to the top,'...

Recent research suggests that double taxation treaties (DTTs) increase bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI). However, entering such a tax treaty is not unambiguously favourable for both partners if their bilateral FDI positions are asymmetric. Due to the usual bias towards residence-based...

Accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is unlike accession to other international organizations. It is extremely demanding on applicant countries, time consuming and essentially power- rather than rule-based. This article argues that existing WTO members select themselves into the...