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"In this compelling book, leading economist James Boyce shows that the key to curtailing our use of fossil fuels is to put a price on carbon emissions. But how do we secure broad public support for a policy that increases fuel costs for consumers? This book's proposed solution is essential reading for all concerned citizens and policy-makers"--

Economics for People and the Planet, a collection of essays by James K. Boyce on the environment, inequality and the economy, argues that there is not an inexorable trade-off between advancing human well-being and having a clean and safe environment. The goal of economic policy should be to grow the good things that improve our well-being and environmental quality and reduce the bad things that harm humans and nature. To reorient the economy for these ends, we will need to achieve a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power. Global climate change - the most pressing environmental challenge of our time - adds urgency to this task and creates historic opportunities for moving towards a greener future.

Comprising a decade's worth of essays written since the publication of the author's pathbreaking book, The Political Economy of the Environment (2002), this volume discusses a number of diverse environmental issues through an economist's lens. Topics covered include environmental justice, disaster response, globalization and the environment, industrial toxins and other pollutants, cap-and-dividend climate policies, and agricultural biodiversity.

This book analyzes the provision of aid to countries that have undergone negotiated settlements to civil wars, drawing on recent experiences in Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Guatemala. It focuses on the potential for peace conditionality, linking aid to steps to implement accords and consolidate the peace. The book explores how aid can encourage domestic investment in peace-related needs; the reconciliation of long-run peacebuilding objectives with short-run humanitarian imperatives; and the obstacles that donors' priorities and procedures pose to effective aid for peace. It concludes

The political economy of the environment aims to deepen our understanding of the interplay among the economy, the environment, and human well-being. In contrast to neoclassical environmental economics, it pays attention not only to the net magnitude of costs and benefits but also to their distribution. In the realm of positive analysis – descriptions of how the world works – this means exploring the multiple ways in which the distribution of wealth and power affects environmental outcomes. In the realm of normative analysis – prescriptions for how the world should work – political economists advocate a range of criteria including not only cost effectiveness but also safety, sustainability, and environmental justice.

The 2015 Paris Agreement adopted the goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperature to 1.5-2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Carbon pricing can play a key role in meeting this objective. A cap-and-permit system, or alternatively a carbon tax indexed to a fixed emission- reduction trajectory, not only can spur cost-effective mitigation and cost-reducing innovation, but also, crucially, can ensure that emissions are held to the target level. The carbon prices needed to meet this constraint are likely to be considerably higher, however, than existing prices and conventional measures of the social cost of carbon. This poses issues of distributional equity and political sustainability that can be addressed by universal dividends funded by carbon revenues.

In the wake of violent conflict, a key element of building a durable peace is building a state with the ability to collect and manage public resources. To implement peace accords and provide public services, the government must be able to collect revenue, allocate resources, and manage expenditure in a manner that is regarded by its citizens as effective and equitable. This paper addresses eight key issues related to this challenge. The first four pertain to resource mobilization: (i) How should distributional impacts enter into revenue policies? (ii) How can postwar external assistance do more to prime the pump of domestic revenue capacity? (iii) Should macroeconomic strictures prescribed for economic stabilization be relaxed to foster political stabilization? (iv) How should the benefits of external resources be weighed against their costs? The second four issues relate to the expenditure side of public finance: (i) How should the dynamics of conflict be factored into public spending policies? (ii) Can the pathologies of a 'dual public sector' one funded and managed by the government, the other by the aid donors be surmounted by channeling external resources through the government, with dual-control oversight mechanisms to reduce corruption? (iii) How should long-term fiscal sustainability enter into short-term expenditure decisions? (iv) Lastly, is there scope for more innovative solutions to postwar legacies of external debts?