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...

In this paper we use annual time series data from 1960 to 2008 to estimate the long run price and income elasticities underlying energy demand in Ireland. The Irish economy is divided into five sectors: residential, industrial, commercial, agricultural and transport, and separate energy demand...

The Chinese central government has approved the seven pilot carbon trading schemes. These seven pilot regions are deliberately selected to be at varying stages of development and are given considerable leeway to design their own schemes. These pilot trading schemes have features in common, but...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on the relationship between environmental regulation and firm behavior. In particular, we ask whether and how strongly investment decisions of firms respond to stringency in environmental regulation. Environmental stringency is measured as (i)...

China has gradually recognized that the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment cannot be sustained. It has to be changed. This article focuses on China's efforts towards energy conservation and environmental quality. The article discusses a variety of...

Putting a price on carbon is considered a crucial step for China's endeavor of harnessing the market forces to reduce its energy consumption and carbon emissions. Indeed, aligned with China's grand experiment with low-carbon provinces and low-carbon cities in six provinces and thirty-six cities,...

While prior literature has identified various effects of environmental policy, this note uses the example of a proposed carbon permit system to illustrate and discuss six different types of distributional effects: (1) higher prices of carbon-intensive products, (2) changes in relative returns to...

This essay revisits the question of instrument choice for the regulation of externalities in the context of climate change. The central point is that the Pigouvian prescription to equate marginal control costs with the expected marginal benefits of damage reduction should guide the design of...

Our paper examined the pollution leakage by the environmental regulation applied in 2+26 cities which are Beijing and surrounding Beijing area. Based on daily emission data, we empirically find that leakage is possibly happened among the firms in the same industry. We also use the example of...

This paper analyzes the effects of environmental policy on employment (and unemployment) using a new general-equilibrium two-sector search model. We find that imposing a pollution tax causes substantial reductions in employment in the regulated (polluting) industry, but this is offset by...