International negotiations for an agreement to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases are unlikely to produce concrete and comprehensive policies for effective emission reductions in the near term, not least because the policy measures being considered are economically very costly to major...

Both the mining and the burning of coal is pollutive, so one might expect to observe taxes on coal production and consumption. Yet several countries in Western Europe subsidize coal production, and most East European countries subsidize coal consumption. The first part of this paper shows that...