China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

In this paper we study the effect of international technology spillovers on carbon leakage. We first develop and analyse two simple competing models for carbon leakage. The first model represents the pollution haven hypothesis. It focuses on the international competition between firms that...

This paper investigates the link between trade and environment by exploring the effects of green tariffs on the location of firms, innovation and the environment. It shows that tariffs levied on polluting goods could result in less global pollution than harmonization of environmental standards...

The Doha declaration on trade and environment proposed to clarify the relationship between multilateral environmental agreement (MEA) trade obligations and WTO rules by only guaranteeing economic integration upon ratification of certain MEAs. In other words, it pushed to authorize the use of...

We study an international climate agreement that assigns emission quotas to each participating country. Unlike the simplest models in the literature, we assume that abatement costs are affected by R&D activities undertaken in all firms in all countries, i.e. abatement technologies are...

Empirical evidence evaluating the efficiency of economic instruments is still rare, despite significant theoretical advances over the last decades. The objective of this paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in...

We analyse river sharing games in which a set of agents located along a river shares the available water. Using coalition theory, we find that the potential benefits of water trade may not be sufficient to make all agents in the river cooperate and acknowledge property rights as a prerequisite...

Climate-economy models aiming at quantifying the costs and effects of climate change impacts and policies have become important tools for climate policy decision-making. Although there are several important dimensions along which models differ, this paper focuses on a key component of climate...

This paper analyses whether and how a climate policy designed to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is likely to change the direction and pace of technical progress. The analysis is performed using an upgraded version of WITCH, a dynamic integrated regional model of the world economy....

The use of environmental policy instruments such as eco-labelling and pesticide taxes should preferably be based on disaggregate estimates of the individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for pesticide risk reductions. We review the empirical valuation literature dealing with pesticide risk...