This essay addresses two major challenges confronting the road tranportation sector: reducing emissions and improving road safety. After energy production, the transportation sector is the second largest source of carbon emissions, accounting for about one quarter of all fossil fuel emissions....

This essay discusses the challenges in financing economic development in the eastern European and CIS economies. The advantages and pitfalls of extensively relying external capital are explored.

Despite recent progress in developing a political consensus that policy changes are needed at both the domestic and international level to address climate change, the required political and public will is still insufficient to overcome a number of political barriers limiting progress.This essay...

This essay explains the importance of the forests as a factor in addressing the challenges in mitigating climate change. The potential of using the forest sector more fully to capture and store carbon has been limited by the failure of current protocols and other climate change mechanisms to...

A key component of climate change mitigation efforts will be the need to develop new technological solutions and to diffuse current state-of-the-art technologies to developing countries. However, due to a number of market failures, the required research and technological transfers are currently...

Central to the goals of competitiveness and sustainable development is the issue of energy. Is there enough? Where will it come from? What will it costs? Is its production and use environmentally sustainable? Many of these questions are now discussed under the general topic commonly referred to...

This paper addresses a set of conflicting national objectives, that between economic competitiveness and environmental quality. In lower-income economies, the perceived benefits of improved environmental quality may be valued less than in richer economies while the perceived opportunity costs of...

As a complementary activity to the WTO’s Doha Round of trade negotiations, the Sixth Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong, China, in 2005 mandated that technical assistance and capacity-building activities needed to be expanded so that developing countries could take better advantage of the...

The focus of this essay is to enquire as to what role UNECE can play in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The historic role of the UNECE in bridging the East-West divide and guiding the transition process of the former planned economies is testimony to the importance of this type of...

An overview of current institutional cooperation, economic conditions and challenges in the Mediterranean region.