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Blog Post
November 17, 2021
Governments use corrective taxes to reduce the use of products that harm well-being and create costs not just to society at large (externalities) but also to individual consumers who may underestimate the future health consequences of their current consumption. Taxes on gas to reduce pollution or on...
POLICY PAPERS
November 17, 2021
Behind the daily trauma of COVID-19 lies a larger and longer-lasting global health challenge resulting from the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages. Using a sample of 25 large advanced and emerging market economies accounting for three-quarters of global GDP, we show that ...
Blog Post
November 10, 2021
Tobacco use is the world’s leading cause of preventable death, claiming eight million lives per year, which together with tobacco-attributable disability is equivalent to an annual global productivity loss of 1.8 percent of GDP. Extensive evidence shows that tobacco taxation is the most effective an...
POLICY PAPERS
October 13, 2021
The structural changes in an economy that accompany its growth to high-income status have been predictable in Europe, the United States, and Asia, characterized by declining employment in agriculture and rising levels of urbanization driven by jobs in the modern industrial sector. As agricultural pr...
Blog Post
September 27, 2021
The debate over whether development finance should be allowed for downstream gas projects appears to be settling toward a compromise that makes such investments rare but not impossible. But will it be so in practice? Lessons from a previous (eerily similar) compromise suggest that any flexibili...
POLICY PAPERS
August 13, 2021
The purpose of a nation’s power sector is to deliver reliable electricity at the lowest cost and for the greatest benefit. At the heart of any private electricity generation project is a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), a contract that contains key provisions such as price, payment stipulations, and ...
Blog Post
July 09, 2021
Earlier this year, I wrote about the ban on the international financing of fossil fuels, proposed by Special Envoy John Kerry and others. I argued that such a ban would be particularly devastating for poor countries that are reliant on institutions such as the World Bank to finance much-needed energ...
Blog Post
June 30, 2021
The US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is the $60 billion agency that’s supposed to catalyze investment to capital-starved countries, bolster job-creation in emerging markets, and support US foreign policy. The BUILD Act which created the DFC was a bipartisan bill, carefully craf...
Blog Post
April 12, 2021
Bitcoin has failed to live up to the hype that it would democratize finance by enabling cheap, instantaneous, and secure payments that could be conducted without having to rely on stodgy old financial institutions like banks and credit card companies. And the Bitcoin network’s spiraling energy needs...