This paper provides an overview of the U.S. experience with market-based instruments with four categories: emission charges, tradeable permit systems,market friction reduction, and government subsidy reduction. Following that, I examine normative lessons that can be learned from these...

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the...

Environmental policies typically combine the identification of a goal with some means to achieve that goal. This chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Environmental Economics focuses exclusively on the second component, the means - the "instruments" - of environmental policy, and considers, in...

In the past 15 years, incentive-based environmental policy instruments, such as pollution taxes and tradeable pollution permits, have become an important supplement to tradition command-and-control instruments in Europe and the U.S. This paper proposes a positive theory of environmental...

There are no other two countries in the world that trade as much between themselves as do Canada and the U.S.. It should thus come as no surprise that the U.S. deviation from international obligations makes Canadian industries' competitiveness (trade) concerns become even more rigorous. Against...

The European Commission (2001a) has recently presented a directive proposal to the Parliament and the Council in order to implement a tradable permits scheme. However, as stressed by the positive political economy, due to the influence of various interest groups, very few environmental policies...

This essay reviews the implementation experience with three main applications of tradable permit systems: air pollution control, water supply and fisheries management. Opening with a brief summary of the theory behind these programs and both the economic and environmental consequences...

Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, economies in transition are eligible for both emissions trading (Article 17) and joint implementation (Article 6). Guiding rules for implementing these mechanisms were decided through the Marrakech Accords in November 2001. These countries may benefit substantially...

We develop and discuss the three pathways to European Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading: a top-down scheme based on the Kyoto Protocol of the UNFCCC, a bottom-up scheme linking national trading systems of EU Member States, and an EU-wide regional scheme based on the founding principles of the...

An integrated assessment model is used to simulate the introduction of various emissions trading schemes based on the Kyoto protocol on the reduction of greenhouse emissions. The implications of the various systems in terms of income distribution are illustrated, and it is claimed that the issue...