International capital mobility has long been associated with financial and banking crises.  The Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund contain multi-lateral rules to govern global capital flows.  For some countries, especially those in the developing world, the IMF Articles...

Market based policies are fast becoming the recommended policy panacea for all the world's environmental problems. Implicit in such recommendations is the theory that free markets, adjusted for externalities, can always create an "efficient" allocation of society's resources. As a result, many...

Market based policies are fast becoming the recommended policy panacea for all the world’s environmental problems. Implicit in such recommendations is the theory that free markets, adjusted for externalities, can always create an “efficient” allocation of society’s resources. As a...

Economic theory suggests that liberalization of trade between countries with differing levels of environmental protection could lead pollution- intensive industry to concentrate in the nations where regulations are lax. This effect, often referred to as the “pollution haven” hypothesis, is...

Some believe that the current financial and economic crises have ended the dominance of the Washington Consensus once and for all. In a ceremony at Tufts University, two eminent international economists, Robert Wade and José Antonio Ocampo, were recently awarded the Leontief Prize for advancing...

Since the early 1990s Latin American nations have been signing trade treaties with the United States that have brought small gains and high costs. Pending deals between the United States and Colombia and the United States and Panama are no different. Each is based on the same template that has...

In the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, the world economy was characterized as experiencing a ‘two-speed’ recovery. Industrialized nations, where the crisis occurred, saw slow growth whereas many emerging market and developing countries grew significantly. These growth...

Unstable global capital flows to developing countries have been characteristic of the world economy in the wake of the global financial crisis. The nations that have deployed capital controls to mitigate the negative effects of such flows have been branded as “protectionist” by some. This...

Environmental economics assumes that reliance on price signals, adjusted for externalities, normally leads to efficient solutions to environmental problems. We explore a limiting case, when market volatility created "mixed signals": waste paper and other recycled materials were briefly worth an...