Working Paper 16-02 - The New Economic Geography : a survey of the literature

This overview of the literature dedicated to the new economic geography intends to highlight the main mechanisms, which contribute to explain the spatial concentration of economic activity, in particular the formation of cities and industrial districts. This should provide some guidelines for an empirical analysis of the determinants of the spatial distribution of economic activity in urban areas in Belgium and for suggestions of economic policy instruments capable of influencing location choices.

How to lead world society towards sustainable development?

In political terms it all started with the World Commission on Environment and Development which in its 1987 report Our Common Future stated that ...humanity has the ability to make development sustainable - to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED, p. 8). The Commission defined sustainable development as ... a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investment, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs (WCED, p. 9; italics added), Sustainable development thus deals with two fundamental issues, i.e. inter-generational equity and comprehensive structural adjustment. --

Internationally tradeable emission certificates: efficiency and equity in linking environmental protection with economic development

Three topics dominate the formulation an international greenhouse-gas regime as part of an effective global environmental policy. Efficiency, equity, and uncertainty. And three major policy instruments are discussed as regards the implementation of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change: A carbon tax/C02-charge, joint implementation, and tradeable emission certificates. This paper tries to answer a question that has not been rigidly asked before: How could tradeable emission certificates be tailored in such a way as to be of benefit to the developing countries, to facilitate global environmental protection and economic development at the same time, and to meet both the efficiency and the equity criterion in international relations. Next to market organization and rules of procedure, allocation of the entitlements is crucial. The author suggests a dynamic formulae, by which the initial allocation of certificates starts on the basis of current greenhouse-gas emissions but over time turns towards equity in the form of equal per capita emissions. In this way, making emission entitlements tradeable among countries implies not only that a globally effective limit to total emissions is attained with certainty, but also that the current unfair allocation of emission entitlements is consecutively shifted in favour of the poor countries. --

Review of the list of LDCs

The Committee for Development Policy is required by Economic and Social Council resolution 1991/46 to conduct triennially a review to determine the countries to be added or graduated from the list of least developed countries (LDCs). Since the previous review was conducted in 2000, the Committee conducted another review in 2003. The Committee bases its identification of the LDCs on the consideration of three dimensions of a country's state of development - its income level, its stock of human assets and its economic vulnerability. The Committee thus uses (a) Gross National Income (GNI) per capita as an indicator of income; (b) the Human Assets Index (HAI) as an indicator of the stock of human assets; and (c) the Economic Vulnerability Index (EVI) as an indicator of economic vulnerability. In addition, because the underlying concept of the LDC category excludes large economies, in 1991 the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) endorsed the principle that no country with a population exceeding 75 million should be considered for addition to the list. --

World ecology and global environmental governance

Environmental problems have always been part of our history, of life, and work. Yet the way in which environmental problems are perceived and politicized has changed: If it was at first chiefly local and regional environmental problems that were recognized, in recent years global environmental problems that have been a major cause of concern. Global problems can be tackled only by means of an internationally coordinated, global environmental policy; local and regional environmental policies have to be integrated into this context. --