The book presents estimates of total wealth for nearly 120 countries, using economic theory to decompose the wealth of a nation into its component pieces: produced capital, natural resources and human resources. The wealth estimates aims to provide a unique opportunity to look at economic...

How rich would resource-abundant countries be if they had actually followed the Hartwick Rule (invest resource rents in other assets) over the past 30 years? The authors use time series data on investments and rents on exhaustible resource extraction for 70 countries to answer this question. The...

The World Bank has been publishing estimates of adjusted net or "genuine" saving since 1999. This measure of saving treats depletion of natural resources as a type of economic depreciation. Hamilton uses recent theoretical results relating growth in saving to growth in future consumption to...

How has environment mattered for the World Bank? The aggregate figures suggest that it has mattered a great deal, since the Bank's total environmental lending has exceeded $US 9 billion over the past six years. In this paper the authors use newly available data to address a more precise version...

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 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...

The World Bank's "World Development Indicators 1999" highlights for the first time the "genuine" rate of saving for more than 100 countries around the globe. Genuine saving values the total change in economic assets, thereby providing an indicator of whether an economy is on a sustainable path....

Estimates of total factor productivity growth, a measure of increases in the efficiency of production, have traditionally been based on a two-factor model of labor and fixed capital. Because profits are measured residually in the System of National Accounts, they implicitly include rents on...

This study analyzes whether subjective well-being measures can explain variation in peaceful uprisings, in addition to the objective measures typically used in analyses of this type of events. Using data on uprisings and subjective well-being for 118 countries from 2007 to 2014-a period during...