The sustainability debate concerns whether the world will experience stable or improving living standards for the foreseeable future, or whether the current trajectory will overtax the natural environment, leading to a ‘crash’ in living standards. This paper selectively reviews relevant research, focusing on both ecological concerns and technological progress, and asks whether sustainability wo...

JEL classification: C31 D6 O13 Q56 The measurement of natural capital and its management during the economic development process are important aspects of the capital approach to sustainable development. However, the assessment of social welfare in terms of genuine savings (or changes in total wealth per capita) is arguably too limited. This paper tries to make a case for the incorporation of su...

Using panel data on water pollution in Brazilian rivers, we study inter-jurisdictional externalities when more jurisdictions start managing the same river segment. Counties split at each election cycle, which change the locations of borders. This allow us to identify the effects of border crossings and the spatial pattern of pollution as rivers approach borders, controlling for fixed effects an...

Paragraph 31(iii) of the Doha Ministerial Declaration mandates to the liberalization of environmental goods and services. This mandate offers a good opportunity to put climate-friendly goods and services on a fast track to liberalization. Agreement on this paragraph should represent one immediate contribution that the WTO can make to fight against climate change. This paper presents the key iss...

A better understanding of household water use in developing countries is necessary to manage and expand water systems more effectively. Several meta-analyzes have examined the determinants of household water demand in industrialized countries, but little effort has been made to synthesize the growing body of literature evaluating household water demand in developing countries. This article revi...

Around 3 billion people in developing countries rely on woodfuels for their daily cooking needs with profound negative implications for their workload, health, and budget as well as the environment. Improved cookstove (ICS) technologies in many cases appear to be an obvious solution. Despite continuous eff orts of the international community to disseminate ICS, take up rates in most developing ...

This paper examines the trade-off between resource intensive development and preservation of natural resources in the context of groundwater. Use of public schemes that expand groundwater irrigation to mitigate poverty is challenged as being unsustainable, especially when water tables around the world are rapidly depleting. This paper evaluates the effects one such scheme on groundwater use in ...

Using a large plant level data set, this paper carries out an econometric analysis of the environmental performance of multinational …rms in the gold mining industry worldwide. The aim of the analysis is to determine if, by looking at the actual environmental performance of …rms (as opposed to inferring such behavior from location decisions), we can shed any light on important questions in the ...

In this article we study the implication of thresholds in preferences. To model this we extend the basic model of John and Pecchenino (1994) by allowing the current level of environmental quality to have a discrete impact on how an agent trades off future consumption and environmental quality. In other words, we endogenize the semi-elasticity of utility based on a step function. We motivate the...

We derive an expression relating the change in instantaneous utility to the growth of net (genuine) saving in an economy with multiple stocks and externalities that maximizes welfare in the utilitarian sense. This result is then shown to hold for decentralized competitive efficient economies as well, to yield an extension of the Hartwick rule: instantaneous utility is non-declining along a deve...