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Environment and Energy

This report examines patterns and trends in resource use and resource efficiency in 16 selected emerging economies between 1985 and 2005. In order to facilitate comparison, the authors divided these countries into three different groups according to their dominant strategy of economic development since 1985: resource-based economies with a high ratio of raw materials in exports, including Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Morocco, Russia and South Africa; industry-based economies which have been expanding their capacity to produce manufactured goods and related services, including China, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Mexico and the Republic of Korea; and services-based economies that have largely based their development since 1985 on services (e.g. tourism, financial or knowledge-based industries), including Barbados, Egypt, India and the Seychelles. While none of these three development paths is exclusive, they are useful categories for analytical purposes, as each is linked to specific physical or material profiles in terms of resource use and resource productivity. 

Organisation :
European Commission

This report constitutes the findings of a study on the potential of market pull instruments for promoting innovation in environmental characteristics. The study was conducted by COWI A/S in collaboration with Ecotec Ltd.

The study aims at providing an insight into and an enhanced understanding of the extent to which demand pull instruments promote innovation and to investigate the assumption that greater demand lead to greater innovation.

 The study builds on the outcome of an extensive literature review; nearly 40 interviews conducted with industry representatives across a total of six industrial sectors, including business associations; researchers; and a workshop.

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
This paper illustrates the potential for developing sustainable environment management practices such as BioTrade in Latin America.
Organisation :
World Bank Group

This book is organised as follows: the first chapter examines the pattern of structural transformation in Middle East and North Africa, or MENA and summarises the role of various factors examined thoroughly in the rest of the volume. The second chapter examines the correlates of this overall disappointing performance. At the macro level, MENA countries have been unable to maintain depreciated (undervalued) real exchange rates for long periods, yet such undervaluation has proved important to offset the market failures and poor institutional environment that severely hit the dynamic non-resource-intensive traded sectors.

Organisation :
World Bank Group

The world's first cities were in the Uruk cluster in Mesopotamia. The largest was Ur, which appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh (one of the earliest known works of literature, set around 3,500 BCE). Extending over 60 hectares, Ur was home to about 24,000 people. But as an irrigation city, also providing marketing and defense services, it governed and extracted surpluses from a neighboring population of about 500,000. Its urban population was densely concentrated, more than 400 people per hectare, and the planning practices were strikingly sophisticated. With four main residential areas, Ur offered its inhabitants basic amenities such as well-laid-out streets and sanitation. The report provides a framework to help city leaders make informed decisions for sustainable development in their cities. This book, planning, connecting, and financing cities, now distills the lessons learned from these diagnostics into a practical framework for sustainable urbanization, which is organized around the three policy pillars of the title.