In 2004, ten new states entered the European Union. Relative to the pre-2004 member states, these accession states have lower environmental standards, and some worry that it will be too demanding for these new EU members to fully comply with European environmental provisions. In this paper, we...

Both theoretical and empirical studies have shown that democracy and corruption have substantial influence on environmental policy. In this paper, we empirically analyse whether both democracy and corruption are equally important determinants. When these variables are jointly included as...

We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...

We develop a framework for the representation of material flows in competitive equilibrium. Material balances track material flows, which adjust endogenously to economic transactions. We assume negative environmental effects of resource extraction and waste deposition and show that taxing...

It is a common assumption that regions within the same country converge to approximately the same steady-state income levels. The so-called absolute convergence hypothesis focuses on initial income levels to account for the variability in income growth among regions. Empirical data seem to...