The 2011 Martin Kunz Memorial Lecture: Air transport, the environment and institutional economics

The focus of this paper looks the role that institutional economics can play in helping our understanding of how environmental problems arise in the air transport sector, and how policy responses are derived. It is positive in the sense that it seeks to help our understanding of things, rather than being in anyway prescriptive about what should be done to enhance the environmental performance of the air transport sector. What does seem to be clear is that simply arguments over alternative policy tools or packages of tools is rather sterile without due consideration of the prevailing institutional structures.