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Panama : Country Environmental AnalysisPanama is experiencing spectacular economic growth, averaging 7.5 percent during 2004-06; a construction boom; and emerging new opportunities and growing export markets. Despite this impressive growth performance, at the national level poverty remained almost unchanged during 1997-2006 at around 37 percent (masking a decline in rural poverty and an increase in urban and indigenous areas). Key development challenges for Panama include: (a) sustaining its accelerated recent growth performance, and (b) translating growth into poverty reduction. Natural resources and the environment must be key elements of any successful strategy to meet these challenges. The main objective of the Panama Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) is to provide an analytical foundation to enhance the country's capacity to establish and address environmental policy priorities linked to poverty reduction and sustained economic growth. This report covers three main areas. First, the report analyzes the capabilities of Panama's institutions to perform essential tasks to manage the environment and natural resources; namely identifying problems and designing and implementing policies to solve them. The analysis therefore places great emphasis on the clarity of policies; mechanisms for coordination; use of and access to information, participation, and consultation; and, mechanisms to promote compliance with legislation. The premise of the institutional approach is that only strong institutions are able to offer efficient, equitable, and durable solutions to the increasingly complex problems faced by modern societies. Second, the report identifies environmental and natural resource management issues of key sectors, such as mining and tourism, to provide information on strategic synergies and tradeoffs involving the environment, economic growth, and poverty. Finally, the report offers new quantitative estimates in the fields of environmental health and climate change that will help the Government of Panama establish policy priorities.
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Republic of Ecuador Country Environmental Analysis : Environmental Quality and Natural Resource Management for Sustained Economic Growth and Poverty AlleviationEcuador is a country with exceptional natural resource and environmental advantages and challenges. It is strategically located and has considerable oil reserves in the interior and the coastal region. This document does not aim to describe the state of the environment in Ecuador. Rather, its main objective is to provide an analytical foundation to identify the country's institutional weaknesses and provide practical policy options that will enhance its capacity to establish and address environmental policy priorities linked to poverty reduction and sustained economic growth. Linking environmental considerations to sectoral projects and policies will provide important information on key synergies and tradeoffs involving the environment, economic growth, and poverty. The second objective is to guide environmental assistance and capacity building supported by the bank or other development partners through the assessment of capacity issues, especially in relation to specific environmental priorities. The main elements of the Country Environment Analysis (CEA) include analyses of: a) environment and natural- resource-related institutions, b) the environmental aspects of the oil sector, c) forestry, d) conservation, e) environmental-health, and f) climate change. The CEA also identifies policy recommendations and describes the role that the World Bank could play in helping the Government of Ecuador (GOE) strengthen its institutional capacity in order to address the country's natural resource and environmental problems in a more effective way.
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Four Decades of Health Economics through a Bibliometric LensThis paper takes a bibliometric tour of
 the past 40 years of health economics using bibliographic
 "metadata" from EconLit supplemented by citation
 data from Google Scholar and the authors' topical
 classifications. The authors report the growth of health
 economics (33,000 publications since 1969 -- 12,000 more
 than in the economics of education) and list the 300
 most-cited publications broken down by topic. They report
 the changing topical and geographic focus of health
 economics (the topics 'Determinants of health and
 ill-health' and 'Health statistics and
 econometrics' both show an upward trend, and the field
 has expanded appreciably into the developing world). They
 also compare authors, countries, institutions, and journals
 in terms of the volume of publications and their influence
 as measured through various citation-based indices
 (Grossman, the US, Harvard and the JHE emerge close to or at
 the top on a variety of measures).