Working Paper
Carbon pricing under binding political constraints
The economic prescription for climate change is clear: price carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions to internalize climate damages. In practice, a variety of political economy constraints prevent the introduction of a carbon price...
Working Paper
A Framework for Incorporating Environmental Indicators to the Measurement of Human Well-Being
This study, relying on an economic-theoretical approach to index numbers, proposes a framework for incorporating environmental indicators to the measurement of human well-being. Furthermore this study also proposes an improvement index which...
Working Paper
Globalization, Local Ecosystems, and the Rural Poor
Livelihoods of the rural poor in developing countries are critically dependent on the health of the local ecosystems. In this paper we examine the various mechanisms through which globalization can lead to ecosystem degradation, and consequently...
Working Paper
Flood Pulses, International Watercourse Law, and Common Pool Resources
In river basins around the world, formal agreements based on international watercourse law are seen as important mechanisms for promoting sustainability and cooperation. While such agreements have been effective in avoiding conflict between states in...
Working Paper
Climate and Industrial Policy in an Asymmetric World
Climate change is a phenomenon leading to randomly distributed disasters around the globe. Due to massive economic and technical asymmetry between the advanced North and the developing South efficient climate and industrial policy is particular...
Journal Special Issue
Sustainable Development
The papers in this special issue represent the concluding stage of a 10-year research project, in the framework of UNU/WIDER, on economic stabilization and medium-term adjustment, directed by Professor Lance Taylor. This project has been one of the...
Working Paper
The Effect of Climate Change on Economic Growth
This paper is a contribution to the empirics of climate change and its effect on sustainable economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data on two climate variables, temperature and precipitation, and employing panel cointegration techniques, we...
Policy Brief
Vulnerability in Developing Countries
The first Millennium Development Goal aims to halve the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty. In this Research Brief, emanating from the UNU-WIDER project on ‘Fragility and Development’, the premise is that we should also be...
Working Paper
Changes in Climatic Factors and Malaria in Uganda
The study examines the relationship between climatic factors and reported malaria cases using data from 12 districts in Uganda over the period 2000-2011. A panel dataset comprising temperature, temperature standard deviation; minimum humidity...
Working Paper
Tree Plantations in the Philippines and Thailand
The area of forest plantations in the tropics has increased for many reasons, but not the least as a result of natural forest depletion. Although forest plantations cannot qualitatively substitute the timber grown in natural forests, their importance...
Book Chapter
Land Tenure and Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Journal Special Issue
Climate Change and the Zambezi River Valley
The articles in this special issue set forth a set of technical contributions that will improve the understanding of the impacts of climate change in developing countries. They are drawn from the Development Under Climate Change (DUCC) project...
Working Paper
Changes in Land Tenure and Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan Africa
Due to increasing population pressure on limited cultivable land in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), farm size has been shrinking, fallow periods have been shortened, and soil fertility has been declining. In accordance with the Boserupian...
In the media
Vox article on the political hurdles facing a carbon tax — and how to overcome them
Based partially on the WIDER Working Paper by Jesse Jenkins and Valerie Karplus, David Roberts from the news website Vox discusses the complex relationship between carbon pricing and binding political constraints.
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (April 2013)
30 April 2013 Tony Addison As April closes, our thoughts turn to UNU-WIDER’s spring/summer programme. And it’s a busy one. June sees us back in...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (December 2013)
10 December 2013 Tony Addison Our November-December Angle comes amid intense activity on our ReCom—Research and Communication on Foreign Aid—programme...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (March 2013)
Tony Addison This month saw UNU-WIDER in Stockholm for the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the social sectors’, which took place at Sida on 13 March...
Blog
The Gothenburg Graduates and their Impact in Africa – How Aid has Worked: An Interview with Wisdom Akpalu
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
August 2013
29 August 2013 Carl-Gustav Lindén Since 1997 the University of Gothenburg, Sweden has been running a unique PhD programme on environmental and...
Working Paper
Every Drop Counts
Water and sanitation sectors have been the ‘natural’ subjects of aid for several decades. However, these sectors also were among those most affected by changes in aid approaches and tools. The aim of this paper is to capture some of the complexity in...
Working Paper
The Effectiveness of Foreign Aid for Sustainable Energy
Foreign aid and technology transfer are an essential means, especially for the least developed countries, towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals as well as facilitating adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change. The deployment of...
Working Paper
Green Growth
What are the major determinants of green growth? What role can the government play to promote green growth? To address these questions, this paper develops a simple Green Solow model that sheds light on the role of finance and technology in the...
Book
Who Will Save the Forests?
Conflicts over the management of forest resources are examined, comparing situations in India, Finland and the USA. The examples illustrate how the interrelationships between people and their environment differ depending on the knowledge systems of...
Book
The North, the South, and the Environment
The essays in this study contribute to an analysis of the prospects for the world's economy in the face of environmental constraints. The contributors examine the implications of development in both northern and southern hemispheres, and the extreme...
Book
National Environmental Policies
This book is a collection of systematically prepared case studies describing the environmental policy of thirteen countries in terms of capacity-building. Capacity for environmental policy and management, as the concept is used in this volume, has...
Book
The North, the South, and the Environment
The essays in this study contribute to an analysis of the prospects for the world's economy in the face of environmental constraints. The contributors examine the implications of development in both northern and southern hemispheres, and the extreme...
Book
The Environment and Emerging Development Issues
Two and a half billion people are affected directly on a day to day basis by the allocation and use of primary local resources. Yet `official' development economics has concentrated on headline international issues and only recently begun to take...
Book
The Environment and Emerging Development Issues
Two and a half billion people are affected directly on a day to day basis by the allocation and use of purely local resources. Yet `official' development economics has concentrated on headline international issues and only recently begun to take...
Book
The Environment and Emerging Development Issues
This text is the first of two volumes. Two and a half billion people are affected directly on a day-to-day basis by the allocation and use of local resources. Yet ‘official’ development economics has concentrated on headline international issues and...
Position Paper
Aid, Environment and Climate Change
This position paper on Aid, Environment, and Climate Change, prepared under the UNU-WIDER ReCom programme of Research (Re) and Communication (Com) on foreign aid, is intended to improve the understanding of the role foreign aid has played and can...
Working Paper
Climate Uncertainty and Economic Development
We apply a probabilistic approach to the evaluation of climate change impacts in the Zambeze River Valley. The economic modeling relies on an economywide modeling approach. Taking a distribution of shocks as inputs, we create hybrid frequency...
Research Brief
Every Drop Counts – Improving Aid to Water and Sanitation
Each dollar of aid per year provides 0.17 people with access to water or sanitation. This amounts to a cost of US$5.88 per person. Due to economies of scale, countries with large populations benefit more from aid to the water and sanitation sectors...
Book
The Economics of Transnational Commons
Transnational commons, cross-border areas without well-defined property rights, have long been ignored in 'official' development economics. This volume redresses the balance by adopting an environmental approach which stresses the importance of...
Book
The Environment and Emerging Development Issues
Two and a half billion people are affected directly on a day to day basis by the allocation and use of purely local resources. Yet `official' development economics has concentrated on headline international issues and only recently begun to take...
Working Paper
Can Climate Finance Achieve Gender Equity in Developing Countries?
We develop the climate finance-gender equity framework in this paper and use the ‘contextual-procedural-distributive’ equity as a lens of analysis to examine how climate finance helps challenge, and reinforce, gender inequities in the mitigation...
Working Paper
REDD+ as Performance-Based Aid
REDD+, when it officially became part of the international climate agenda in 2007, was an idea about payment to countries and projects for reducing emission from forests, with funding primarily from carbon markets. REDD+ has since become multi...
Working Paper
Aid and the Environment
Botswana has serious environmental problems which, if not addressed, will undermine the attainment of sustainable economic development. This study attempts to determine what aid flows have actually been doing with regard to the environment in...