Mining represents an important economic sector in almost all countries, especially the developing ones. The planning in this area is complex due to the interaction between different aspects like economic factors, environmental and social issues, and government regulation. A tool for policy analysis is needed to understand and test the effects of new and existing policies and avoid unanticipated side effects.

Coal has fueled China's rapid growth in recent decades, but it also severely pollutes the air and causes many health issues. The magnitude of the health damage caused by air pollution depends on the location of emission sources. In this paper, we look into the spatial distribution of coal-fired power plants, which are the major emission sources in China, and investigate the determining factors behind the distribution.

Does public transportation reduce vehicle congestion? Using a regression-discontinuity framework, we examine the effect of six subway openings on short-run congestion in Beijing between 2009 and 2015. We find that vehicle congestion drops sharply immediately after new subway openings. In our central specification, each of the subway openings decreased delay times by an average of 15% in the short run over the city of Beijing.

Using the data of SOEs and Non-SOEs in industrial sector of China from 1998 to 2007, we investigate the impact of privatization on TFP. We construct a difference in difference model and use propensity score method to avoid the selection bias. We use the type of enterprises registration to identify the SOEs and define the privatization. The regress results show, privatization of SOEs can improve the efficiency of enterprises significantly. Some characteristics of firms will affect the effect of privatization.

Africa is endowed with an incredible amount of natural resources of which
the extractive sector is a key component. Unfortunately, however, the continent
is characterized by a paradox of plenty or resource curse, depicting a situation
of abundant resources that have not translated into economic growth and
prosperity for the population. The potential role of the extractive sector is
further affected by global volatilities. This article reviews the importance of
the extractive sector to selected African countries. It identifies sources of

We pair a firm-level panel of annual industrial output with a fine-scale daily weather data set, to estimate the responses of industrial output to temperature changes in China. We have four primary findings. First, industrial output is nonlinear in temperature changes. With seasonal average temperatures as temperature variables, output responds positively to higher spring temperatures and negatively to elevated summer temperatures.

Compared with the developed countries, the developing countries could be more vulnerable to oil supply disruptions due to their lack of strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs). Several developing countries, including China and India, are establishing their SPRs to ensure energy security. In the common world oil market, one country's SPR decisions can be affected by the decisions of other countries.

This is a chapter in the book entitled ‘How can Tanzania move from poverty to prosperity?’

The idea for this book first originated in 2012 when writing a paper for a workshop for the University of Dar es Salaam Mwalimu Nyerere Chair on Development. More recently, it has been driven by the fact that, despite making some progress, the country continues to struggle in the seemingly never-ending cycle of poverty, disease, aid dependency, the dearth of infrastructure and corruption. These are challenges that policy-makers and the government grapple with day in day out

Since the 1960s and 1970s, the international community has dedicated a considerable amount of its lending portfolios and technical assistance capacities to investments into infrastructure such as roads, electricity, and water networks. In spite of these continous efforts, billions of people worldwide are still lacking acces to electricity, clean water, sanitation, and quality roads. At the same time, the lack of infrastructure access is often said to be a major barrier to sustainable human development.

How may environmental regulation affect firm location choice? While this question has generated great research interest from high-standard, industrial economies, in this article we turn the spotlight to low-standard, developing countries and use China’s Census of Manufactures data during 2003–2008 to explore how firms with different ownership, during different policy regimes as well as from different industries may respond to environmental regulations in different ways.