When abatement costs are uncertain, but correlated, and a country becomes pri-vately informed that costs are low, then unilateral actions serve as a signalling devise to reveal low costs and unilateral actions have the potential to trigger positive responses abroad. However, the country engaging...

Based on the political support function model by Hillman (1982), we consider the choice of policy instruments in environmental regulation. More specifically, we extend the Hillman model so that it can incorporate the connection between the relative strength of lobby groups, the chosen level of...

Why did the climate negotiations in The Hague fail? Our contribution is to argue that the conflict between the European Union and the United States stems mainly from disagreement on the cost issue. We argue that three main concerns promoted by the European Union in The Hague, i.e. a 50% national...

The EU Commission has recently proposed a new directive establishing a framework for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading within the European Union. The idea is to devalue the emission quotas in circulation by the year 2012 at latest, so that the EU will meet its Kyoto target level of an 8%...

Real life implies that public procurement contracting of renewable resources results in repeated interaction between a principal and the agents. The present paper analyses ratchet effects in contracting of renewable resources and how the presence of a resource constraint alters the "standard"...

Why has the EU been so eager to continue the climate negotiations? Can it be solely attributed to the EU feeling morally obliged to be the main initiator of continued progress on the climate change negotiations, or can industrial inter-ests in the EU, at least partly, explain the behaviour of...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether the presence of Hot Air trading jeopardizes the environmental target of an international environmental agree-ment. We argue that Hot Air can be used as an implicit side-payment mecha-nism to actually bring about higher environmental protection...

Both Barrett (1991) and Hoel (1991) show that uniform solutions cannot guarantee that the IR constraint is satisfied. This drawback of uniform solutions dramatically reduces feasibility of uniform solutions. However, when uniform reductions are property specified, this conclusion is no longer...

Why has the EU been so eager to continue the climate negotiations? Can it be solely attributed to the EU feeling morally obliged to be the main initiator of continued progress on the climate change negotiations, or can industrial inter-ests in the EU, at least partly, explain the behaviour of...

When abatement costs are uncertain, but correlated, and a country becomes pri-vately informed that costs are low, then unilateral actions serve as a signalling devise to reveal low costs and unilateral actions have the potential to trigger positive responses abroad. However, the country engaging...