BACKGROUND Protected areas are the first, and often only, line of defense in efforts to conserve biodiversity. They might be detrimental or beneficial to rural communities depending on how they alter economic opportunities and access to natural resources. As such, protected areas may attract or repel human settlement. Disproportionate increases in population growth near protected area boundarie...

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals is increasingly being accepted as a major development objective in Asian and Pacific countries. In this paper, it is argued that, in order to fulfill this objective, attention needs to be paid to the nexus between achieving the Goals and economic growth. Pro-growth MDGs are as important as pro-MDG growth. Appropriate macroeconomic and sectoral policies...

One of the surprising features of modern economic growth is that economies abundant in natural resources have tended to grow slower than economies without substantial natural resources. In this paper we show that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1970 (the base year) tended to grow slowly during the subsequent 20-year period 1970-1990. This negative relationship ...

as well as from a number of more detailed papers available upon request. 1 The opening line of the standard textbook in the area states that the " most basic proposition of growth theory is that in order to sustain a positive growth rate of output per capita in the long run, there must be continual advances in technological knowledge " (Aghion and Howitt, 1998, p. 11).

This paper investigates very long run pre-industrial economic development. New annual GDP per capita data for six European countries over the last seven hundred years paints a clearer picture of the history of European economic development. First, it confirms that sustained growth has been a recent phenomenon, but rejects the argument that there was no permanent growth in living standards befor...

This paper investigates the extent to which the decline in child mortality over the last three decades can be attributed to economic growth. In doing this, it exploits the considerable variation in growth over this period, across states and over time. The analysis is able to condition upon a number of economic and demographic variables. The estimates are used to produce a crude estimate of the ...