An identity links the rate of economic growth, the speed of poverty reduction and changes in the distribution of income during some time period in a given country. A few authors used that identity to understand the causes for observed changes in poverty and to identify the exact role of economic growth in poverty reduction. Yet, many empirical cross-country studies of the relationship between g...

US shale gas production is generally expected to continue its fast rise. However, a cautious evaluation is needed. Shale gas resource estimates are potentially overoptimistic and it is uncertain to which extent they can be produced economically. Moreover, the adverse environmental effects of ever more wells to be drilled may lead to a fall in public acceptance and a strengthening of regulation....

International cooperation will be critical to solving the world's toughest environmental problems, including climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity. Regrettably, most evidence suggests that the 1,000 or so different International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) operating today are ineffectual, merely ratifying business-as-usual outcomes and doing little to improve the environment. Bu...

This paper offers a unifying conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between climate change and “within-country inequalities,” referred here collectively as “social inequality.” Available evidence indicates that this relationship is characterized by a vicious cycle, whereby initial inequality causes the disadvantaged groups to suffer disproportionately from the adverse effects o...

The establishment of a tradable permit market requires the regulator to select a level of aggregate emissions and then distribute the associated permits (rent) to speci…c groups. In most circumstances, these decisions are often politically contentious and frequently in‡uenced by rent seeking behaviour. In this paper, we use a contest model to analyse the e¤ects of rent seeking e¤ort when permit...

In this paper, we use stochastic dynamic programming to model the choice of a municipality which has to design an optimal waste management program under uncertainty about the price of recyclables in the secondary market. The municipality can, by undertaking an irreversible investment, adopt a ‡exible program which integrates the existing land…ll strategy with recycling, keeping the option to sw...