India’s economy is under threat with rising unemployment, Banks in crisis, falling GDP and farmers’ unrest making headlines daily. In this brilliant and urgent book, The country’s most important economists, including Abhijit Banerjee, Gita Gopinath and Raghuram Rajan, bring together their proposals on how to get the country back on track. Collectively the book provides solutions to the key problems that India is currently facing – labour reforms, healthcare, education and the environment –while also focusing on the vital economic growth of the nation.

Shale gas development in China can generate great potential economic benefits, but also poses serious environmental risks. In this paper, we offer a macro assessment of the environmental risks of shale gas development in China.

Although the financial and economic crises have diverted attention from global and local environmental threats and natural resources management issues in developing and developed economies, environment and development concerns must remain on the agendas. The IPCC just released the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC 5th Assessment Report, which will focus World’s attention on topics such as the impact of climate change and the possible mitigation and adaptation options. This report follows the June 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio.

This study investigates the impact of climate change adaptation on farm households’ downside risk exposure in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function. We use an empirical strategy that accounts for the heterogeneity in the decision on whether to adapt or not, and for unobservable characteristics of farmers and their farm.

This paper studies how different NOx abatement technologies have diffused under the Swedish system of refunded emissions charges and analyzes the determinants of the time to adoption. The policy, under which the charge revenues are refunded back to the regulated firms in proportion to energy output, was explicitly designed to affect investment in NOx reducing technologies.

Pro-environmental behavior is the willingness to cooperate and contribute to environmental public goods. A good understanding of why individuals undertake pro-environmental actions is important in order to construct policies that are aligned with preferences and actual behavioral patterns, such as concern for social esteem and reputation.

Eco-certification of coffee, timber and other high-value agricultural commodities is increasingly widespread. In principle, it can improve commodity producers' environmental performance, even in countries where state regulation is weak. But eco-certification will have limited environmental benefits if, as one would expect, it disproportionately selects for producers already meeting certification standards.

The economics of climate change and the various measures that should be implemented to reduce future damages are highly tied to the use of cost-benefit analysis. Traditional approaches ignore the fact that environmental amenities do not experience the same growth rate as do most of the sectors in the economy, which leads to changing relative prices. Uncertainty should also be considered, especially when one is conducting cost-benefit analysis involving the long-run damages from climate change.

We examine the effects of schools and parents, the two of the most important sources of influence, on views of human-nature relationship of 6th grade primary school children in China.