Donors frequently claim that a country's record on human rights plays a role in the decision whether it receives aid and if so, how much. This study of total bilateral and multilateral aid flows finds that human rights play at best a rather limited role in the allocation of aid. Aspects of human...

This article provides a statistical analysis of the determinants of Arab aid allocation using Heckman's two-step estimator. It is found that poorer, Arab, Islamic and Sub-Saharan African countries are more likely to receive some positive amount of Arab aid (gate-keeping stage). The same is true...

This article critically assesses three links on how trade might harm the environment. First, trade liberalisation might exacerbate existing levels of resource depletion and en-vironmental pollution. Second, open borders might allow companies to migrate to ‘pol-lution havens', thus undermining...

This article analyses which factors determine the allocation of debt forgiveness. In particular, it is examined what role various aspects of governance play. The results indicate that countries' need is a powerful determinant for debt forgiveness, whereas creditors' political interest is not,...

This article puts forward a number of arguments why trade openness might promote multilateral environmental cooperation. Most of these arguments are grounded in the substantive self-interest of the trading country. It tests the proposition using a range of proxy variables for general trade...

This article discusses whether the Treaty establishing the European Community (TEU) is actually more environmentally friendly than the WTO agreements and whether it can provide a role model for greening the WTO agreements. It analyses whether European Union (EU) member states have greater leeway...

This paper proposes to qualify a country's human development as potentially unsustainable if the net depreciation of its manufactured and natural capital stock is bigger than its investment. Linking the Human Development Index with sustainability in this way would allow the United Nations...

We address the question of state militarization under conditions of ethnic and other diversity. Primordialist claims about ancient hatreds, fear, and insecurity in such societies would lead one to expect that fractionalization, polarization and ethno-nationalist exclusion would prompt...

We analyze spatial spillover effects in international tourism as a consequence of transnational terrorist attacks. Specifically, we hypothesize that attacks executed in Islamic countries on citizens from Western countries will generate spatial spillovers of three kinds. Firstly, tourism from the...

Governments can significantly reduce earthquake mortality by enforcing quake-proof construction regulation. We examine why many governments do not. First, mortality is lower in countries with higher earthquake propensity, where the payoffs to investments in mortality prevention are greater....