Although environmental regulations may imply a cost increase on firm's conventional input factors, such regulations could stimulate the incentives to improve factor productivity. Productivity measures including indicators capturing environmental improvements may also show higher or lower...

Productivity measures ignoring environmental effects may give misleading information on total productivity growth. Further, business cycles in the form of capacity utilization may also significantly influence productivity measures. In this paper, we develop an overall Malmquist productivity...

In 2002/2003, the Nordic hydro-dominated power market faced a short-term supply shock. In autumn, precipitation and inflow were unusually low. As a result, there were record high prices in the following winter. Questions were raised whether the deregulated market creates sufficient incentives to...

Over the last few decades, several instruments have evolved to deal with similar energy and environmental challenges. For instance, the economic literature prescribes separate tax or cap-and-trade systems to internalize negative environmental externalities and subsidies to internalize positive...

Although most production activities involve multiple outputs, econometric models of production or cost functions normally involve only one single homogeneous output. The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that a multiproduct specification is superior to a model with a single homogenous...

Many economists maintain that environmental regulations hamper productivity growth. However, recently, an opposing view has gained advocates. Indeed, it has been suggested that the empirically detected inverse relationship between environmental regulations and productivity growth is an almost...

The Integration Pollution and Prevention Control (IPPC) directive from the European Union implies that the regulatory emission caps should be set in accordance with each industry's Best Available Techniques (BAT). The directive is under implementation in Norway, and it represents a refocus of...

The environmental drag is the cost to society of environmental constraints. This paper estimates the long-run environmental drag on the Norwegian economy. We employ a model called DREAM (dynamic resource / environmental applied model). This is an applied general equilibrium model extended to...

Generation of solid waste is closely associated with the use of tangible factor inputs and production levels in the economy. In this paper, we present projections of waste generated in the Norwegian manufacturing industry based on the development in these factors as simulated by a computable...

The environmental Kuznets curve theory suggests that economic growth may reduce environmental problems. In this article, we analyze the changes in environmentally damaging emissions to air in Norway from 1980 to 1996. In order to reveal the factors which decrease the emissions per produced unit,...