China had been the world's second largest carbon emitter for years. However, recent studies show that China had overtaken the US as the world's largest emitter in 2007. This has put China on the spotlight, just at a time when the world community starts negotiating a post-Kyoto climate regime...

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 exposure...

This paper analyses whether different emissions trading regimes provide different incentives to participate in a cooperative climate agreement. Different incentive structures are discussed for those countries, namely the US, Russia and China, that are most important in the climate negotiation...

The Kyoto Protocol on climate change allocates tradable quotas to developed countries, but let them free to choose the means to respect their quota. There are good reasons for a country not to control its firms through internationally tradable permits. We thus compare a tax and purely domestic...

A number of recent papers have found that certain measures of pollution worsen and later improve as income per head increases. It is widely believed that the downhill portion of this inverted-U curve reflects an induced policy response; that, as incomes rise, citizens demand improvements in...

A number of countries face water shortages because they need to make some basic changes in their water management. Policy options do exist. Most of them share the objective of treating water and water services as an economic good, by regulating private inefficient appropriation of open-access...

Approximately $30 billion (2000$) has been spent on Superfund clean-ups of hazardous waste sites, and remediation efforts are incomplete at roughly half of the 1,500 Superfund sites. This study estimates the effect of Superfund clean-ups on local housing price appreciation. We compare housing...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...

Using results from two contingent valuation surveys conducted in Canada and the U.S., we explore the effect of a latency period on willingness to pay (WTP) for reduced mortality risk using both structural and reduced form approaches. We find that delaying the time at which the risk reduction...

China had been singled out by Western politicians and media for dragging its feet on international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, the accusations previously always targeted on the U.S. To put such a criticism into perspective, this paper provides some reflections on China's stance and...