Richard Damania

World Bank · Economics and Sustainability

Clean air, land, and oceans are critical for human health and nutrition and underpin much of the world’s economy. Yet they suffer from degradation, poor management, and overuse due to government subsidies. "Detox Development: Repurposing Environmentally Harmful Subsidies" examines the impact of subsidies on these foundational natural assets. Explic...

Declining water quality can impact the economy in various ways. Impacts can be found in the health sector, where labor productivity can be affected, in agriculture, where the quality and quantity of food produced can be reduced, and in tourism, real estate, aquaculture/fisheries and other sectors which rely on environmental quality and ecosystem se...

Clean water is key for sustainable development. However, large gaps in monitoring data limit our understanding of global hotspots of water quality and their evolution over time. We demonstrate the value added of a data-driven approach to provide accurate high-frequency estimates of surface water quality worldwide over the period 1992-2010. We asses...

Can countries reorient their productive capacity to become more environmentally friendly and inclusive? To investigate this question this paper uses a standard Input-Output modeling framework and data from 141 countries and regions to construct a new global dataset of employment, value-added, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (disaggregated into CO2 a...

Developing countries have experienced growing structural weaknesses over the last decade. COVID-19 and climate change have further aggravated these, worsening poverty and inequality, and starkly exposing the interdependence between people, the planet, and the economy. A business-as-usual recovery package that ignores these interlinkages would likel...

Migration shapes the lives of those who move and transforms the geographies and economies of their points of departure and destinations alike. The water sector, and the availability of water itself, implicitly and explicitly shape migration flows. Ebb and Flow, Volume 1. Water, Migration, and Development presents new global evidence to advance our...

Water is more often a victim and casualty of conflict – rather than a primary source of conflict – in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Although there have been local instances of strife and displacement in response to water concerns, there is limited evidence that water risks cause large-scale forced displacement or lead directly to conflic...

An important line of scholarship concludes that stemming the biodiversity crisis requires widespread nonanthropocentric modes of action and decision-making. In this regard, knowing what would even constitute a nonanthropocentric economic decision-making framework is hobbled by failing to recognize a conflation in the taxonomy of capital as supposed...

Significance Rainfall anomalies are known to have deleterious impacts on agricultural yields, but the resulting consequences on cropland expansion remain uncertain. We study the differential scale of these impacts around the world. We find that repeated dry anomalies increase cropland expansion specifically in developing countries, which are charac...

This paper addresses a seldom recognized empirical puzzle. Much micro-econometric evidence suggests that precipitation has wide ranging impacts on vital economic indicators such as agricultural yields, human capital and even conflict. And yet paradoxically most macro-econometric evidence (especially in the climate economics literature) finds that p...

Does the availability or variability of water matter for the economy? Does it meaningfully impact the growth and development trajectory of a country? It may seem surprising that answers to these most basic of questions remain elusive. The aim of this paper is to summarize recent work on the economic impacts of water scarcity and variability. The pa...

This article investigates the links between forests and poverty in India. We use original data from a household survey in two states of India (Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh) to provide new insights into this relationship. The poorest are found to receive about 30% of their incomes from forests – an amount that is higher than the income that they...

Cropland expansion is the primary driver of deforestation worldwide. Since land and rainfall are two crucial inputs for agricultural production, a lack of rainfall may have severe consequences on yields, which in turn may lead to a change in cultivated areas, with possible impacts on deforestation rates. Our paper explores this issue of drought ind...

Measurement and governance must advance together

In this paper we consider some of the economic implications of climate change scenarios as described in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). By comparing potential water demand with estimates of (sustainable) water availability in different regions, we identify regions that are likely to be constrained in their future economic growth potential...

Roads bring significant economic benefits that are vital for development. But they are often also the precursors to deforestation and other adverse environmental impacts. This paper examines the road-induced tradeoffs between economic growth, deforestation, and biodiversity loss in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Decades of conflict have le...

Transport infrastructure consumes a large fraction of the development assistance envelope. Yet procedures for evaluating transport infrastructure projects are typically ad-hoc. This paper proposes an approach to assess the differential impacts of alternative investment proposals in data constrained environments where conducting reliable impact anal...

This paper presents a somewhat novel approach to explore the economic contribution of ecosystems. It develops linked models to capture connections between resource stocks and flows and the resulting microeconomic and macroeconomic impacts. A bioeconomic model is developed that is imbedded into a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Incorpora...

This report examines an old and recurring challenge in developing economies - that of securing the benefits of infrastructure without the associated ecological damage. Drawing upon developments in spatial econometrics and GIS it develops a proactive approach that can assist in avoiding ecological damage while securing economic benefits.

This article seeks to address an old and recurring theme in development economics—the slow adoption of new technologies by farmers in many developing countries. We explore a somewhat novel explanation for this puzzle—the link between market access and the incentives to adopt a new technology when there are non-convexities. We develop a theoretical...

In this paper we consider some of the economic implications of climate change scenarios as described in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). By comparing potential water demand with estimates of (sustainable) water availability in different regions, we identify regions that are likely to be constrained in their future economic growth potential...

The Mexican State of Quintana Roo, located in the Caribbean, is an area of high environmental and socio-economic value. Its low elevation and long coastline render the State physically and economically highly vulnerable to accelerated sea-level rise. The purpose of this study is to undertake an initial assessment of the potential land loss and cost...

In conflict prone situations access to markets is deemed to be necessary to restore economic growth and generate the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence the rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has emerged as an overarching investment priority amongst donors and governments. There is, however, little theoretical work or...

ABSTRACT This paper presents a somewhat novel approach to explore the economic contribution of ecosystems. It develops linked models to capture connections between resource stocks and flows and the resulting microeconomic and macroeconomic impacts. A bioeconomic model is developed that is imbedded into a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model....