Environmental degradation can inflict serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods often depend on natural resource use and their living conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained options may induce the poor to...

The World Bank's new environment strategy advocates cost-effective reduction of air and water pollutants that are most harmful to human health. In addition, it addresses threats to the livelihood of over one billion people who live on fragile lands-lands that are steeply sloped, arid, or covered...

New research on urban air pollution casts doubt on the conventional view of the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. This view holds that pollution automatically increases until societies reach middle-income status because poor countries have neither the institutional...

The authors develop comparative indices of environmental policy and performance for 31 countries using a quantified analysis of reports prepared for the United Nations Conference on Environmental and Development. In cross-country regressions, they find a very strong, continuous association...

Only a small number of studies have empirically examined the determinants of the monitoring and enforcement performed by environmental regulators, and most of these have focused on industrial countries. In contrast, the authors empirically examine the determinants of enforcement in China. More...

The complaints process in China provides useful information and helps encourage community participation in environmental policy. But it also directs a big share of inspection resources to areas where people tend to complain. After analyzing provincial data for 1987-93, the authors find the...

Industry compliance with pollution regulations is far from universal, even in North America. In developing countries, compliance rates are often quite low, particularly where budgets for regulation are low or inspectors are corrupt. And strictness of enforcement varies. Regulators are reluctant...

Indoor air pollution (IAP) from cooking and heating is estimated to kill a million children annually in developing countries. To promote a better understanding of IAP, the authors investigate the determinants of IAP in Bangladesh using the latest air monitoring technology and a national...

Little empirical research has been done on monitoring and enforcement issues in environmental economics, especially to analyze the impact of monitoring and enforcement on polluters'environmental performance. No studies have been done in developing economies. The authors explore the impact of...

The accounting and public release of information about industrial toxic pollution emissions is meeting increasing criticism in that these listings typically do not account for the different toxicity risks associated with different pollutants. A firm emitting a large amount of relatively harmless...