Biodiversity prospecting, or the investigation of biological samples for potential new pharmaceutical products or biotechnology, has drawn considerable attention as a source of revenues for governments concerned with the preservation of biodiversity. Recent agreements designed to extract some of the surplus associated with the marketing of successful products by firms have employed royalties on...

The poorest nations of the world suffer from extreme disease burdens, which go largely untreated because weak incomes and the prevailing system of intellectual property rights fail to provide sufficient incentives to develop new treatments and distribute them at low cost. Recent price reductions for HIV/AIDS drugs are encouraging but offer only a limited solution. We discuss the economic tradeo...

Could globalization trigger an environmental "race to the bottom," in which competition for investment and jobs relentlessly degrades environmental standards? Since billions of people subsist on less than two dollars a day, it would be cavalier to dismiss this threat lightly. Indeed, the race-to-the-bottom (RTTB) model provokes widespread concern because its underlying assumptions have an air o...

Recently, the effects of global climate changes have become top concerns for governments’ decision making regarding infrastructure investments. Extreme weather events that exceed the capacity of existing systems have considerably increased in frequency, and the potential effects of changing trends in temperature and rainfall on infrastructure are difficult to ignore. It is essential for governm...

Procurement by governments accounts for 10-15 percent of national product in most Western nations [McAfee and McMillan (1985a)]. Consequently, analyses of procurement policies apply to a significant portion of economic activity. This paper considers sequential procurement: a buyer will purchase items in sequence, with costs correlated across time. Thus, if auctions are held, bids in the first a...