Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Capital Flight From Sub-Saharan African Countries: Updated Estimates, 1970 - 2010, James K. Boyce, Léonce Ndikumana

James K. Boyce

The performance of Sub-Saharan African economies over the past decade has inspired optimism on the region’s prospects. But the region still faces major development challenges, and it is now clear that the majority of its countries will not achieve key millennium development goals.

A key constraint to SSA’s growth and development is the shortage of financing. At the same time, the sub-region is a source of large-scale capital flight, which escalated during last decade even as the region experienced growth acceleration. The group of 33 SSA countries covered by this report has lost a total of $814 billion dollars from …

Comment On Khan, Li And Weisbrot (Thomas Weisskopf Festschrift Conference Paper), James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

Boyce comments on Shahrukh Khan's " The Military and Economic Development in Pakistan, Minqi Li's "Socialism: The 20th Century and the 21st Century" and Mark Weisbrot's "Economic Growth: The Great Slowdown (1980-2000) and Recovery (2000-2010)." He adds his own thoughts on the theme running through these papers: the need to take the role of the state, both in terms of state control over the means of production and resource allocation, but also about the core issue of control over the state itself. This means engaging, as Khan, Li and Weisbrot do, with the historic struggle to build and sustain real …

Capital Flight From North African Countries, Léonce Ndikumana, James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

Ndikumana and Boyce demonstrate that, while the countries of North Africa have achieved high levels of development relative to their sister nations south of the Sahara, they too have suffered from financial hemorrhages through capital flight. The burden on their economies is substantial in terms of lost investment and foregone government revenue, with adverse effects on economic growth and social service delivery. The authors provide estimates of the total amount of capital flight from four North African countries: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, from 1970 to 2010.

Cooling The Planet, Clearing The Air: Climate Policy, Carbon Pricing, And Co-Benefits, James K. Boyce, Manuel Pastor

James K. Boyce

Policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can yield substantial co-benefits via reduced emissions of co-pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and air toxics. Valuation studies suggest that these benefits may be comparable in magnitude to the value of reduced carbon emissions. However, co-pollutant intensity (the ratio of co-benefits to carbon dioxide emissions) varies across pollution sources, and so efficient policy design would seek greater emissions reductions where co-benefits are higher. Moreover, because co-pollutant impacts are localized, the distribution of co-benefits raises important issues of equity, particularly with regard to the unintentional income, racial, and geographic disparities that might result …

Reflections On Development Economics: An Interview With Keith Griffin, James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

In an interview conducted by James Boyce for the journal Development and Change, Keith Griffin reflects on his career and the current state of development economics. Griffin is Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and former President of Magdalen College, Oxford University. A prominent critic of orthodox economic development strategies, his books include Underdevelopment in Spanish America; The Political Economy of Agrarian Change; and Alternative Strategies for Economic Development.

Financing Peace: International And National Resources For Postconflict Countries And Fragile States, James K. Boyce, Shepard Forman

James K. Boyce

This background paper for the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 discusses current financing arrangements for postconflict countries and fragile states, with a focus on official development assistance. In recent years a consensus has emerged that in these “difficult environments” the core objective is to build effective and legitimate governance structures that secure public confidence through provision of personal security, equal justice and the rule of law, economic well-being, and essential social services including education and health. Yet tensions persist between business-as-usual development policies on the one hand and policies responsive to the demands of peacebuilding on the other. The …

Clear Economics: State-Level Impacts Of The Carbon Limits And Energy For America’S Renewal Act On Family Incomes And Jobs, James K. Boyce, Matthew Riddle

James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce and Matthew Riddle have updated earlier anlysis that examines the household-level impacts of a cap-and-dividend plan, and how they differ between states. In this paper, the authors not only consider the specific parameters of the 2010 CLEAR Act, but also add an assessment of the state-by-state job creation that would have resulted from the bill. Boyce & Riddle find that interstate differences in the bill’s impact on household incomes would have been small: much smaller than differences across the income spectrum, and vastly smaller than the differences in other federal programs, such as defense spending. As a …

Is Environmental Justice Good For White Folks?, Michael Ash, James K. Boyce, Grace Chang, Helen Scharber

James K. Boyce

This paper examines spatial variations in exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in urban areas of the United States, using geographic microdata from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk‐Screening Environmental Indicators project. We find that average exposure in an urban area is positively correlated with the extent of racial and ethnic disparity in the distribution of the exposure burden. This correlation could arise from causal linkages in either or both directions: the ability to displace pollution onto minorities may lower the effective cost of pollution for industrial firms; and higher average pollution burdens may induce whites to invest …

Senate Testimony On Cap-And-Dividend Policies, James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

In this testimony presented to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, James Boyce describes the range of options to be considered in the auctioning, distribution and compensation for carbon capping permits. He goes on to describe in some detail how a cap-and-dividend policy will protect American families from the impacts of the higher fossil fuel prices which will inevitably accompany carbon capping, thereby making it a politically palatable approach to curbing our greenhouse gas emmisions.

Justice In The Air: Tracking Toxic Pollution From America's Industries And Companies To Our States, Cities And Neighborhoods, Michael Ash, James K. Boyce, Grace Chang, Manuel Pastor, Justin Scoggins, Jennifer Tran

James K. Boyce

No abstract provided.

Is Inequality Bad For The Environment?, James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

By respecting nature’s limits and investing in nature’s wealth, we can protect and enhance the environment’s ability to sustain human well-being. But how humans interact with nature is intimately tied to how we interact with each other. Those who are relatively powerful and wealthy typically gain disproportionate benefits from the economic activities that degrade the environment, while those who are relatively powerless and poor typically bear disproportionate costs. All else equal, wider political and economic inequalities tend to result in higher levels of environmental harm. For this reason, efforts to safeguard the natural environment must go hand-in-hand with efforts to …

A Chinese Sky Trust? Distributional Impacts Of Carbon Charges And Revenue Recycling In China, Mark Brenner, Matthew Riddle, James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

The introduction of carbon charges on the use of fossil fuels in China would have a progressive impact on income distribution. This outcome, which contrasts to the regressive distributional impact found in most studies of carbon charges in industrialized countries, is driven primarily by differences between urban and rural expenditure patterns. If carbon revenues were recycled on an equal per capita basis via a ‘sky trust,’ the progressive impact would be further enhanced: low-income (mainly rural) households would receive more in sky-trust dividends than they pay in carbon charges, and high-income (mainly urban) households would pay more than they receive …