How are prosperity and greenery re-lated? It has been a combative and so rar undecided issue among environmentalists and economists, made the more so by the poor quality of most environmental data. Now a team led by Dan Esty of Yale University, with support from Columbia University and the World Economic Forum (wef), hopes to fill that information gap, and per- haps to help answer the broader question, too. Their team has developed the Environmental Sustainability Index (esi), a detailed assessment of dozens of variables that influence the environmental health of economies (see chart). The team released its rankings of 122 countries this week, to coincide with the forum's schmoozathon of businessmen and political leaders at Davos, in Switzerland.
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