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.

Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or revealed preferences studies. We explore a complementary measure of congestion costs based on self-reported happiness. Exploiting quasi-random variation in daily congestion in Beijing that arises because of superstitions about the number four, we estimate a strong effect of daily congestion on self-reported happiness.

We analyzed whether a competitive market can behave non-competitively when it is temporarily outside of its long-run equilibrium trajectory.

We pair a county-level panel of annual industrial output with a fine-scale daily weather dataset to  estimate the responses of industrial output to temperature changes in China. We have three primary findings. First, industrial output is nonlinear in temperature changes. With seasonal average temperatures as temperature variables, industrial output increases by 0.7–1.0% for each 1°C increase in average spring temperature, and falls by 1.3–2.3% for each 1°C increase in average summer temperature.

In this paper we analyze the effects of environmental policies on the size distribution of firms. We model a stationary industry where the observed size distribution is a solution to the profit maximization problem of heterogeneous firms that differ in terms of their energy efficiency. We compare the equilibrium size distribution under emission taxes, uniform emission standards, and performance standards. Our results indicate that, unlike emission taxes and performance standards, emission standards introduce regulatory asymmetries favoring small firms.

This study examines the linkage between the profitability of firms measured by return on assets (ROA) and environmental performance measured by eco-efficiency and also the impact of a good environmental management system (EMS) on profitability and eco-efficiency of firms.

As an international metropolitan area undergoing rapid development, Beijing is facing a sharp rise in the volume of motor vehicles and mobility, which has become the major contributor to the air pollution in this city.

Dependency of urban Ethiopian households on rural areas for about 85 percent of their fuel needs is a significant cause of deforestation and forest degradation, resulting in growing fuel scarcity and higher firewood prices.