Environmental management amidst energy use,urbanization, trade openness,and deforestation: The Nigerian experience

This study empirically explores the linkage between urbanization and deforestation while controlling for the role of energy consumption, trade openness, and economic growth within recent data from 1971 to 2015. To do this, we employed the vector error correction‐Granger causality approach and Pesaran's autoregressive distributed lag cointegration technique. The Bayer–Hanck cointegration test establishes an equilibrium relationship among the variables. Results reveal that economic growth, energy consumption, and urbanization have a significant impact on deforestation in Nigeria, thereby reducing the quality of the environment. Short‐ and long‐run unidirectional casualty flows from urbanization to deforestation. Therefore, policies for reducing deforestation and enhancing environmental sustainability for growth and development were suggested.     

Interactions among intergovernmental organizations in the anti-corruption realm

This study focuses on interactions between intergovernmental organizations (IOs) working in the anti-corruption realm. It investigates the factors that enhance IO cooperation. Based on expectations derived primarily from the organization theory literature and, more specifically, from exchange theory, we develop a set of hypotheses regarding the relevance of IO financial resources, expertise, prestige, and bureaucratic culture on the likelihood that IOs will engage in cooperative behavior. The study tests these hypotheses on the formal and informal collaborative networks formed between seventeen IOs engaged in anti-corruption work. The results of the tests offer support for most of the hypotheses and suggest several additional arguments explaining the likelihood of inter-organizational collaboration.     

Disjunction between policy research and practice: Social benefit-cost analysis and investment policy at the World Bank

One often comes upon cases where, even allowing for long lags, policy-makers do not utilize readily available policy research. The gap between policy research and practice has important consequences, both for researchers and for practitioners. In an effort to clarify the causes of the phenomenon, this paper discusses a specific experience: social benefit-cost analysis for investment choice in the World Bank. The analysis may be useful both to the social scientists who do policy research and to the practitioners who might make more use of it.     

The debate on World Dynamics: A response to Nordhaus

In a recent paper published in the Economic Journal, Professor William D. Nordhaus of Yale University reviewed World Dynamics by Jay W. Forrester. In his criticism, Nordhaus signals three serious problems and several additional questionable assumptions of sufficient importance to undermine the usefulness of Forrester's book. However, a careful examination of his analysis shows that each point made by Nordhaus rests on a misunderstanding of World Dynamics, a misuse of empirical data, or an inability to analyze properly the dynamic behavior of the model by static equilibrium methods.The three serious problems raised by Nordhaus concern the assumptions that connect industrialization to net birth rates in World Dynamics, the representation of technology and production within the world model, and the impact of prices on global resource use. The analysis presented here refutes the Nordhaus arguments and shows that World Dynamics is consistent with his references to real-world data on population, production, and capital accumulation.This paper is a response to William D. Nordhaus, World Dynamics: Measurement Without Data, published in the Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, December 1973. An earlier, unpublished, version of the Nordhaus paper, bearing the same title, was widely circulated hand-tohand within the United States, Canada, and Europe. A response to the original Nordhaus paper (System Dynamics Group Memorandum D-1736-4) was written in February 1973 and is available from Jay W. Forrester, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. 02139. The present paper, a revised version of the earlier response, deals with several new or modified arguments contained in the Economic Journal article by Nordhaus.