Climate change is likely to lead to an increase in the frequency and/or intensity of certain types of natural hazards, if not globally, then at least in certain regions. All other things equal, this should lead to an increase in the economic toll from natural disasters over time. Yet, all other...

The ‘California effect' hypothesis posits that economic integration may lead to the ratcheting upwards of regulatory standards towards levels found in higher-regulating jurisdictions. Although a number of previous large sample quantitative studies have investigated such convergence dynamics...

Donors frequently claim that a country's record on human rights plays a role in the decision whether it receives aid and if so, how much. This study of total bilateral and multilateral aid flows finds that human rights play at best a rather limited role in the allocation of aid. Aspects of human...

This article provides a statistical analysis of the determinants of Arab aid allocation using Heckman's two-step estimator. It is found that poorer, Arab, Islamic and Sub-Saharan African countries are more likely to receive some positive amount of Arab aid (gate-keeping stage). The same is true...

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...