Considering the costs and risks of inaction, ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is economically rational. However, success in abating world emissions will ultimately require a least-cost set of policy instruments that is applied as widely as possible across all emission sources...

This paper examines the cost of a range of national, regional and global mitigation policies and the corresponding incentives for countries to participate in ambitious international mitigation actions. The paper illustrates the scope for available instruments to strengthen these incentives and...

As countries implement stricter environmental policies, the need for tools to compare countries’ environmental policy stringency is becoming more pressing. The OECD Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) index has become a widely used tool for policy analysis since its creation in 2014. This...

Cross-country analysis of the economic effects of environmental policies is limited by the lack of reliable, comparable measures of the stringency of environmental policies. This paper attempts to fill this gap, by constructing new quantitative indexes of environmental policy stringency (EPS)....

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

Turkey can achieve strong sustainable growth and job creation but further reforms in the labour market, education and product markets are required for such gains to materialise. In recent years, growth has been largely driven by the industrial catch-up of Anatolian regions, although the Marmara...

This paper examines the cost of a range of national, regional and global mitigation policies and the corresponding incentives for countries to participate in ambitious international mitigation actions. The paper illustrates the scope for available instruments to strengthen these incentives and...

Considering the costs and risks of inaction, ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is economically rational. However, success in abating world emissions will ultimately require a least-cost set of policy instruments that is applied as widely as possible across all emission sources...

Korea’s greenhouse gas emissions almost doubled between 1990 and 2005, the highest growth rate in the OECD area. Korea recently set a target of reducing emissions by 30% by 2020 relative to a “business as usual” baseline, implying a 4% cut from the 2005 level. Achieving this objective in a...

In response to the potential threat of global warming many countries are considering cost effective policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this context much attention has been paid to taxes levied on the carbon content of fuels (carbon taxes), since they are a potentially efficient...