The relatively new and still amorphous concept of "Green Growth" can be understood as a call for balancing longer-term investments in sustaining environmental wealth with nearer-term income growth to reduce poverty. We draw on a large body of economic theory available for providing insights on...

Optimal climate policy is studied in a Ramsey growth model. A developing economy weighs global warming less, hence is more likely to exhaust fossil fuel and exacerbate global warming. The optimal carbon tax is higher for a developed economy. We analyze the optimal time of transition from fossil...

Resource-rich countries have tended to be autocratic and also have tended to use their resource wealth badly. The neoconservative agenda of promoting democratization in resource-rich countries thus offers the hopeful prospect of a better use of their economic opportunities. This paper examines...

Whereas empirical evidence on the effect of higher commodity prices onthe long-run growth of commodity exporters is ambiguous, time series analyses using vector autoregressive (VAR) models have found that commodity booms raise income in the short run. In this paper we adopt panel error...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development,controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital,investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over awide range of...

Cross-country evidence is presented on resource dependence and the link between volatility and growth. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income per capita, the average investment share, initial human capital, trade openness, the...

Countries that are reliant upon commodity exports periodically face large adverse price shocks. Given past volatility the present high world prices for commodities may be a precursor to such shocks. Unsurprisingly, adverse price shocks reduce the growth of constant-price GDP and we analyze which...

The global response to a catastrophic shock to productivity which becomes more imminent with global warming is to have carbon taxes to curb the risk of a calamity and to accumulate precautionary capital to facilitate smoothing of consumption. Our multi-region model of growth and climate change...