Dan Biller

Rollins College · Crummer Graduate School of Business

The South Asia region is home to the largest pool of individuals living under the poverty line, coupled with a fast-growing population. The importance of access to basic infrastructure services on welfare and the quality of life is clear. Yet the South Asia region’s rates of access to infrastructure (sanitation, electricity, telecom, and transport)...

Policy makers are often confronted with a myriad of factors in the investment decision-making process. This issue is particularly acute in infrastructure decisions since these often involve large sums and lock-in technologies. In regions and countries where the infrastructure access gap is large and public budgets severely constrained, the importan...

The unique biodiversity of the Sundarbans is threatened by a number of factors, many of which are the direct or indirect result of market failures. Past governmental interventions aiming at protecting biodiversity have been ineffective, while other government efforts have directly or indirectly led to ecosystem degradation. In order to address thes...

The South Asia region is home to the largest pool of individuals living under the poverty line, coupled with a fast-growing population. The importance of access to basic infrastructure services on welfare and the quality of life is clear. Yet the South Asia region’s rates of access to infrastructure (sanitation, electricity, telecom, and transport)...

If the South Asia region hopes to meet its development goals and not risk slowing down or even halting growth, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity, it is essential to make closing its huge infrastructure gap a priority. Identifying and addressing gaps in the data on expenditure, access, and quality are crucial to ensuring that governments ma...

While South Asia’s average gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the past decade was only slightly lower than in East Asia and the Pacific, the region significantly lags behind in terms of infrastructure access. In some cases, South Asia’s access levels are more similar to sub-Saharan Africa, although considerable heterogeneity exists across the S...

Identifies social policies safeguarding the welfare of groups negatively affected by increases in transport freight efficiency, while at the same time enhancing positive social impacts. The benefits expected from increases in total factor productivity of freight transport remain undeniable, but some groups may nevertheless find themselves adversely...

Covers provincial environmental management agencies, the judicial system and Environmental Tribunals (ETs), and other ministries with environmental responsibilities, examining the recent devolution of Pakistani federal environmental management responsibilities onto provincial governments. The strategic environmental, poverty, and social assessment...

On a trend decline since 1960, Pakistan’s economic growth is highly dependent on financial inflows of aid and worker’s remittances. Manufacturing has great potential, though, based on a growing labor force and rising urbanization and connectivity, but its poor performance stems from its largely low-skilled labor force, poor commercial environment,...

The problem: the extent of biodiversity loss What is biodiversity? Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as: “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part;...

This century's end has been witnessing an increase in environmental concern. While initially a subject of developed countries, developing countries began to realize that the trade off between developing and conserving the environment has to be equated to give present and future generations a chance of success in their development efforts. Thus far,...

Regional cooperation can make an important contribution to improving forest management. This paper examines current regional initiatives to make forest management more sustainable in the Americas and suggests how to extend regional cooperation in the future. It looks in particular at: (a) cooperation in improving information sharing and participato...

The Amazon region has been responsible for a major share of Brazilian gold production in recent years. The region has witnessed a sizable gold rush comparable only to the California gold rush last century. The gold rush has spawned a powerful informal mining sector and has attracted many people - some who have come to the region in search of wealth...

As in other Latin American nations, the petroleum industry has always been surrounded by controversy in Brazil. Issues related to exploration, exploitation, and import of crude have received special attention by Brazilian decision makers. In the past decade, an additional relevant issue was brought into play by the oil crisis. An import substitutio...

Los programas de austeridad para cambiar la inflación usualmente requieren sacrificios en términos de crecimiento económico, y la distribución de esos sacrificios puede afectar la naturaleza del régimen político del país que los aplique, especialmente en el Tercer Mundo.