Annotation Implementing the Environmental Action Programme for Central and Eastern Europe As a result of increasing awareness of the dangers of lead to human health and measures to tackle urban air pollution, the use of lead additives in gasoline has been declining rapidly worldwide since the 1970s. A number of countries have completely eliminated the use of lead additives in gasoline, but in Central and Eastern Europe, lead still ranks as one of the most serious and widespread environmental hazards--yet one that is relatively inexpensive to remedy. At a major international conference on the environment held in Switzerland in 1993, fifty countries endorsed the Environmental Action Programme for Central and Eastern Europe, which addressed environmental priority issues such as lead exposure. Phasing out Lead from Gasoline in Central and Eastern Europe summarizes the findings of case studies on lead phase-out as a first-step study designed to assist in the implementation of the Environmental Action Programme. It examines major sources and levels of lead exposure in the region, looks at the costs of phasing out leaded gasoline, describes progress in reducing lead exposure over the past 5-8 years, identifies human health improvements, and draws on lessons of experience from countries in the region. One of the case studies, for example, describes in detail the complete phase-out of leaded gasoline in the Slovak Republic. Although it recognizes the importance of dealing with all significant sources of lead exposure, the study focuses on lead exposure from the exhaust of vehicles using leaded gasoline.

World Bank Technical Paper No. 397.Human exposure to lead represents a serious environmental health problem in many urban areas. This report underlines the World Banks catalytic role in building government commitment, adopting appropriate policies, and facilitating the implementation of lead phaseout. Based on a review of health and technical issues, it points out that the phaseout of lead from gasoline is a desirable policy measure which can yield significant social benefits.

"Originally developed to help staff, clients, and consultants prepare and implement operations supported by the Bank Group, this Handbook updates and replaces the Environmental Guidelines issued in 1988 and reflects changes both in technology and in pollution management policies and practices. It focuses attention on the environmental and economic benefits of preventing pollution and emphasizes cleaner production and good management techniques."--BOOK JACKET.

This book provides a coherent analysis of the environmental challenges and achievements in institutional strengthening and policy reform, environmental policy instruments, environmental financing, and environmental management in enterprises in transition countries.

Farm structures in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) today cover a whole spectrum of forms, which include small subsistence-oriented household plots, medium-sized commercial family farms, and large corporations. The agricultural sector in CEE definitely has not embraced the family farm as the dominant farming structure, thus confounding the original expectations of Western experts. On the other hand, agriculture did not collapse because of fragmentation and privatization, as predicted by conservative doomsayers. To address the concerns of the farming sector in CEE with relation to EU accession, a workshop was held in Warsaw, Poland in June 1999. This volume represents a selection of papers presented at this workshop. It examines the reforms and policy changes necessary in the food and agriculture sectors of the ten countries that have started the accession process for eventual membership in the European Union (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia). The papers are organized around the following three topics: • Evolving farm structures and competitiveness in agriculture; • Land laws and legal institutions for development of land markets and farm restructuring; and • Development of farm services for improved competitiveness. This volume will be of interest to agricultural policy makers and government officials in the candidate countries, EU officials, World Bank and FAO staff, development scholars, and all others interested in the process of agricultural reform in CEE.

The two-volume set IFIP AICT 363 and 364 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks, EANN 2011, and the 7th IFIP WG 12.5 International Conference, AIAI 2011, held jointly in Corfu, Greece, in September 2011. The 52 revised full papers and 28 revised short papers presented together with 31 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. The second volume includes the papers that were accepted for presentation at the AIAI 2011 conference. They are organized in topical sections on computer vision and robotics, classification/pattern recognition, financial and management applications of AI, fuzzy systems, learning and novel algorithms, recurrent and radial basis function ANN, machine learning, generic algorithms, data mining, reinforcement learning, Web applications of ANN, medical applications of ANN and ethics of AI, and environmental and earth applications of AI. The volume also contains the accepted papers from the First Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Software Engineering (CISE 2011) and the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Applications in Biomedicine (AIAB 2011).

As Thomas Sterner points out, the economic 'toolkit' for dealing with environmental problems has become formidable. It includes taxes, charges, permits, deposit-refund systems, labeling, and other information disclosure mechanisms. Though not all these devices are widely used, empirical application has started within some sectors, and we are beginning to see the first systematic efforts at an advanced policy design that takes due account of market-based incentives. Sterner‘s book encourages more widespread and careful use of economic policy instruments. Intended primarily for application in developing and transitional countries, the book compares the accumulated experiences of the use of economic policy instruments in the U.S. and Europe, as well as in select rich and poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ambitious in scope, the book discusses the design of instruments that can be employed in a wide range of contexts, including transportation, industrial pollution, water pricing, waste, fisheries, forests, and agriculture. Policy Instruments for Environmental and Natural Resource Management is deeply rooted in economics but also informed by perspectives drawn from political, legal, ecological, and psychological research. Sterner notes that, in addition to meeting requirements for efficiency, the selection and design of policy instruments must satisfy criteria involving equity and political acceptability. He is careful to distinguish between the well-designed plans of policymakers and the resulting behavior of society. A copublication of Resources for the Future, the World Bank, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

This book is the first systematic analysis of Russia's poverty and living standards since the country's independence. Its primary goal is to quantify the nature and extent of changes in the welfare of Russians during the course of transition and beyond. Part 1 establishes the economic and methodological framework within which poverty in the Russian Federation is studied. Part 2 comprises a series of chapters that analyze poverty profiles and trends, ranging across monetary and non-monetary indicators. Part 3 addresses selected critical aspects of the system of social support in the impact of public transfers, the extent of private interhousehold transfers, and public opinion about social problems.

Over recent decades national environmental policies have converged. This book analyses the international and domestic driving forces behind this process.