This paper critically assesses the literature on the relationship between economic integration and the environment. In particular, we investigate how trade liberalisation and capital market integration affect environmental policy and thus environmental quality. Conversely, we also study how...

Empirical surveys find no significant impact of environmental regulation and environmental costs on international competitiveness. In the literature, we can find three hypotheses on the impact of environmental regulation. For the industrial-flight and pollution-haven hypothesis, there is no...

This paper sheds some light about privatisation in utilities. An empirical analysis based on sales in the electricity sector in 38 countries for the period 1977-97 shows that regulation is a crucial institutional variable in privatisation. Not only does it allow governments to increase the pace...

This study surveys the academic and professional literature examining the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with a focus on empirical studies. Privatisation has been instrumental in reducing state ownership in many countries and had a transforming effect on global stock markets,...

We argue that in an unreliable enforcement regime, transactions tend to become intermediated through institutions or concentrated among agents bound by some form of private enforcement. Provision of funding shifts from risk capital to debt, and from markets to institutions with long term...

This paper investigates whether privatisation in emerging economies has a significant indirect effect on local stock market development through the resolution of political risk. We argue that a sustained privatisation programme represents a major political test which gradually resolves...

The 1998 Kyoto protocol signalled a new earnestness of international intent toward addressing the perceived risk of climate change. Kyoto demands that developed nations turn their economies so as to hit differentiated, sub-1990 level carbon emission targets within the next decade or so. But when...

Questions of burden sharing receive increasing attention in the climate change regime. This paper introduces the WESA-mechanism (WESA = Walrasian Equilibrium with the Stand Alone upper bound) for the fair division of common property resources and monetary compensations. Furthermore, the...

An integrated assessment model is used to simulate the introduction of various emissions trading schemes based on the Kyoto protocol on the reduction of greenhouse emissions. The implications of the various systems in terms of income distribution are illustrated, and it is claimed that the issue...