Studies of natural resource wealth and civil war have been hampered by measurement error, endogeneity, lack of robustness, and uncertainty about causal mechanisms. This paper develops new measures and new tests to address these problems. It has four main findings. First, the likelihood of civil...

Most political scientists and economists unequivocally accept the proposition that abundant mineral resources are more often a curse than a blessing, particularly for developing countries. We argue that the widely accepted contention that an abundance of mineral resources and the influx of...

It is now commonplace to assert that actions toward sustainable development require a mix of scientific, economic, social and political knowledge, and judgments. The role of research-based knowledge in this complex setting is ambiguous and diverse, and it is undergoing rapid change both in...

This review surveys five major efforts to identify and declare values essential to global sustainability; describes empirical trends (as measured by multinational and global-scale surveys) in values, attitudes, and behaviors related to human and economic development, the environment, and driving...

This chapter reviews the literature relevant to environmental governance in four domains of scholarship: globalization, decentralization, market and individual incentives-based governance, and cross-scale governance. It argues that in view of the complexity and multiscalar character of many of...

The rule of law is almost universally supported at the national and international level. The extraordinary support for the rule of law in theory, however, is possible only because of widely divergent views of what it means in practice. Disparate national traditions posed few problems while...

An increasing number of countries shows a trend towards a certain degree of consolidation of powers in financial supervision, which has resulted in the establishment of unified regulators, different from the national central banks. On the contrary a high involvement of the central bank in...

The Arctic is a key part of the global climate system because the net positive energy input to the tropics must ultimately be resolved through substantial energy losses in high-latitude regions. The Arctic influences the global climate system through both positive and negative feedbacks that...

Historically, arbitrator conduct was guided exclusively by arbitrators' internal ethos and informal social controls. Today, instead of being reserved to personal reflection, arbitrator ethics have become an important topic of public debate, and various trends have led to a proliferation of...

The primary purpose of the paper is to capture in a growth model the conflict of interests between the generation of the young and entrepreneurial on the one hand and the generation of the old and pensioners on the other. The model is applied to assess the size of the gap between optimal...