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Accelerating energy innovation could be an important part of an effective response to the threat of climate change. This book complements existing research on the subject with an exploration of the role that public and private policy have played in enabling—and sustaining—swift innovation in a variety of industries, from agriculture and the life sciences to information technology. Chapters highlight the factors that have determined the impact of past policies, and suggest that effectively managed federal funding, strategies to increase customer demand, and the enabling of aggressive competition from new firms are important ingredients for policies that affect innovative activity.

This is volume I of a four volume set, with papers developed as part of a large-scale project and associated conference series funded by the Gates Foundation. It is comprised of careful empirical reports on progress with economic, political, and social development in Africa over recent decades. Papers are grouped by a rough hierarchy of development. The first volume therefore deals with the essential issues that any country must resolve if there is to be any kind of sustained economic growth and shared benefits from development: is there social peace, does the government function in any kind of reasonable manner, and how does the private sector cope with government dysfunction? The broad theme of our project was that Africa has made much more progress with economic and social development than is widely supposed, and that there is a great deal of success – particularly since 1990 – from which lessons can be gleaned. The papers in this volume deal with ensuring peace after civil conflict, establishing a robust level of revenue for government, thinking about the implications of who holds political power, creating secure property rights, and understanding the nature of the informal economy. Papers also cover important policy innovations, both around road safety and economic development more broadly. We also include a paper that could become a model of how to measure changes in household and per capita income using available data from Africa, and a detailed case study that focuses on the impact of foreign aid on growth.

This is Volume II of a four set series that reports on progress with economic, political, and social development in Africa over recent decades. Volume I deals with social peace, the basic functioning (or not) of government, and how to measure economic development at the household level. Volume II is focused on human capital. This includes public health and various efforts to improve the empowerment–and thus the human development outcomes–for women and girls. We place these issues in a broad economic context, and also include some cutting-edge research on other dimensions of human capital in the African development context. As with the overall economic picture on the past two decades, there are signs of improvement along purely social dimensions of development in Africa. Volume I established that the institutional context for development in Africa remains difficult. But a key theme in Volume II is that no one should conclude that African specifics imply nothing works or that everything becomes corrupted into being completely ineffective. Our researchers have identified important issues, as well as interventions or policy innovations that appear to be gaining traction. The companion volumes III and IV deal with modernization and sustainable growth respectively. Countries covered in detail in this volume include Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia.

This is Volume III of a four volume set that reports on progress with economic, political, and social development in Africa over recent decades. Volume I deals with the essential issues of social stability and other prerequisites for growth. Volume II covers health, gender, and education, all of which are of first-order importance if people are to benefit from and contribute to economic development. Volume III focuses on specific issues of modernization and three key sectors or types of economic activity: finance, mobile phones, and exports. The papers in Volume III contain some firm-level analysis, studies of specific sectors, and cross-country econometrics. We did not attempt to build a comprehensive picture across all countries, but there is a great deal of information about what is going on in wide range of countries – the chapters in this volume contain more in-depth studies of Burundi, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Our main goal was to provide a catalyst for applied research on Africa, and this set of papers demonstrates how we set about achieving that objective. The authors include top researchers, among them people with a great deal of Africa experience and those for whom this was their first time digging into African realities.

This is Volume IV of a four volume set reporting on research on Africa funded by the Gates Foundation. Volume I is focused on conditions that make growth possible; Volume II deals with human development; and Volume III discusses ways in which modernization has come to sub-Saharan Africa, including banking, mobile phones, and dimensions of the export sector. Volume IV examines whether recent African growth rates will prove sustainable. This volume offers three different ways to address this general question. First, five of our research teams look at the details of African agriculture, ranging from its overall prospects to the specific institutional arrangements in two countries. As in our other volumes, the chapters here set a high standard in terms of putting together high quality data and analyzing it using appropriate statistical and econometric technique. Second, one team looked carefully at barriers to trade within West Africa – what keeps markets segmented and prevents trade from developing? Can these obstacles be overcome in the foreseeable future? Four teams look at particular country case studies to understand growth and development and also pay considerable attention to episodes of poor economic performance. Researchers participating in this project were encouraged to combine careful NBER-type empirical analysis with investigations of specific country experiences. In terms of in-depth country analysis, this volume includes material on Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.

Most people would agree that it makes sense to tax a company that pollutes in a way that directly reflects the amount of environmental and social damage it has done. Yet in practice, such taxes are fraught with difficulty and have far-reaching implications. A company facing a new tax may lay off workers, for example, exacerbating an unemployment problem. This volume focuses on such external issues and examines in detail the trade-offs involved in designing policies to deal with environmental problems. Reflecting the broad nature of the subject, the contributors include leading economists in the areas of public finance, industrial organization, and trade theory, as well as environmental economists. Integrating both theoretical and empirical methods, they examine environmental policy design as it relates to location decisions, compliance costs, administrative costs, effects on research and development, and international factor movements.

Humans are plagued by shortsighted thinking, preferring to put off work on complex, deep-seated, or difficult problems in favor of quick-fix solutions to immediate needs. When short-term thinking is applied to economic development, especially in fragile nations, the results—corruption, waste, and faulty planning—are often disastrous. This book draws on the latest research from psychology, economics, institutional design, and legal theory to suggest strategies to overcome powerful obstacles to long-term planning in developing countries. Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the book applies strategies such as the creation and scheduling of tangible and intangible rewards, cognitive exercises to increase the understanding of longer-term consequences, self-restraint mechanisms to protect long-term commitments and enhance credibility, and restructuring policy-making processes to permit greater influence of long-term considerations. The book features theoretically informed research findings and policy examples, and shows how the vagaries of human behavior affect international development.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush published Science: The Endless Frontier and thereby established an intellectual architecture that has largely defined public science institutions and policy since. In this NBER volume, we take stock of the science and innovation environment today and consider two key questions: (1) what are critical dimensions of change in science and innovation systems since Vannevar Bush articulated his vision, and (2) what are the implications of these changes for policies and institutions in the years and decades ahead? The Changing Frontier has twelve chapters in four parts. Part I investigates the organization of scientific research, especially the increasingly dominant role of teamwork. Part II examines shifts in the geography of scientific research and connects to a broader literature suggesting that geographic agglomeration remains an enduring feature of innovative activity. Part III considers market-based innovation, emphasizing new modes of entrepreneurship in mobile applications and clean energy, while also considering state-level entrepreneurship policies. Part IV investigates the evolution of science institutions in the light of Bush’s initial vision, and then considers how science-innovation linkages have shifted with the nature of technology. This volume brings together in one place many important changes in the nature of science and innovation, and articulates the interplay between science and innovation practice and public science institutions and policy.

The rapid decline in the cost of storage, computation, and transmission of data has changed how firms operate and has altered the kinds of products and goods being sold. Increasingly, economic activity is digital. This volume aims to set an agenda for future research in the economics of digitization. Each chapter identifies a promising area of research related to the rise of digital technology, touching topics in areas such as the economics of internet infrastructure, leisure time, search, prediction, labor markets, and advertising. Research on the economics of digitization is distinguished by an emphasis on how digital technology interacts with market outcomes. Digital technologies have some features that suggest that many well-studied economic models may not apply. For example, digital products and services have very low marginal costs of production and distribution and consequently a far greater variety of such goods are available. While such features do not require fundamentally new economic models, they do require more than simply taking theoretical and empirical results from other markets and assuming the implications will be the same. The volume highlights that many public policies that were developed for the offline world seem poorly adapted to digital markets. This has implications in policy debates in areas such as copyright, security, privacy, and antitrust.

The book responds to proceedings of the past couple of decades, especially the efficacy of collective action in light of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The types of adaptation to climate that are described in this volume have received less attention in the economics literature than have policies for mitigation of emissions. The chapters in this volume provide important new empirical information on and analyses of the economics of climate change. They examine responses to past climatic events and in so doing indicate the range of possible future adaptations. This knowledge is critical for understanding how society has reacted to similar occurrences in the past and for developing effective, new private and governmental policies to address them. The chapters describe research findings regarding historical climate-related events as they have been faced in the American economy; the responses of individuals, organizations, and government institutions to those climate challenges; and assessments of their successes in addressing potential disruptions and in promoting the continued economic growth and welfare. The chapters also provide new data sources for measuring and evaluating how economic agents have adjusted to and progressed even in light of formidable environmental concerns.