Our paper explores, on a theoretical level, the reason for frequent failures of rural development policies and identifies some potential improvements in rural policy making in Europe. Our approach to des/integration concerns actors, resources, institutions, knowledge, the fundamental logic of...

Do environmental initiatives like carbon accounting provide a viable alternative to monetary calculation based on profit and loss? Economic insights about calculation and imputation suggest that they do not provide a reliable, rational guide to action. Non-monetary calculation of the...

Pigou (1920) advocated for taxes, set equal to marginal damages, on goods produced and consumed that involve negative externalities. Samuelson (1954) laid out the conditions for optimal pure public goods provision, but noted that free-riding (the “demand revelation” problem) was likely to...

We focus on the coordination failure among domestic firms in the investment of expensive low-carbon technology, which helps reduce the amount of carbon usage and pollution. In this model the firms are charged with a carbon tax only if the total stock of carbon emission in the environment exceeds...

The growth of agricultural productivity is widely believed to be low. But this study finds the productivity growth rate in agriculture to be higher than that in manufacturing, both on average and for groups of countries at different stages of development. This suggests that a large agricultural...

Many firms conduct 'environmental audits' to test compliance with a complex array of environmental regulations. Commentators suggest, however, that self-auditing is not as common as it should be, because firms fear that what they find will be used against them. This article analyzes...

This paper argues that the Kyoto Protocol to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change was doomed to face difficulties ab initio. It explains why this is the case by analyzing the Kyoto Protocol’s shortcomings and deficiencies. Moving the climate change agenda forward multilaterally...

The overall goal of this paper is to review policy analysis for subsequent policy changes with a variety of quantitative methods - to improve the impact of trade on rural poverty and environmental sustainability. This study seeks to improve understanding of the relationship between trade...

The institutional and ecological structure of Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” appears deceptively simple: the open-access pasture eventually will be overexploited and degraded unless (i) it is privatized, (ii) the government regulates access and use, or (iii) the users themselves impose...

There is a large and growing literature on scientific estimates and regulatory instruments associated with international efforts to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The underlying collective action processes have received much less attention. In particular, bargaining among sovereign...