Environmental tax rhetoric in the Estonian policy discussion leads to a dilemma. Policy makers want to increase environmental charges for budgetary reasons and at the same time achieve environmental goals. The article examines the empirics of this issue, i.e. whether pollution charges have been...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of earmarking on central government environment protection expenditure. Since central government spending for the environment relies on earmarked revenues, which is not the case of the local government, it is expected that central government...

Korea, which has had the highest growth rate of greenhouse gas emissions in the OECD area since 1990, adopted an ambitious Green Growth Strategy in 2009. It aims at reducing emissions by 30% by 2020 relative to a “business as usual” scenario, implying a 4% cut from the 2005 level. The...

Whether or not the federal government should price carbon continues to be debated. There were several scholarly pieces examining the relative advantages and disadvantages of cap and trade v. a carbon tax at the time of Congressional Debate on the American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2010....

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints, like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmental policy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetric information while being sufficiently simple for implementation. In this...

Technology policy is the most widespread form of climate policy and is often preferred over seemingly efficient carbon pricing. We propose a new explanation for this observation: gains that predominantly accrue to households with large capital assets and that influence majority decisions in...

France has a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l'environnement encompass policy...

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints,like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmentalpolicy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetricinformation while being sufficiently simple for implementation. Inthis policy,...

France has a very ambitious environmental-policy agenda, aimed chiefly at cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also at dealing with local air and water pollution, waste management and the conservation of biodiversity. The laws that followed the Grenelle de l'environnement encompass policy...

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...