We introduce a "smart" cap and trade system that eliminates the welfare costs of asymmetric information (“uncertainty”). This cap responds endogenously to technology or macroeconomic shocks, relying on the market price of certificates to aggregate information. It allows policy makers to...

In this paper, we test the effect of weather shocks and floods on urban social disorder for a panel of large cities in developing countries. We focus on a particular mechanism, namely the displacement of population into (large) cities. We test this hypothesis using a novel dataset on...

"Prices versus quantities" (Weitzman 1974), a hugely influential paper, is widely cited (and taught) in current debates about the best policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The paper's criterion for ranking policies suggests that technological uncertainty favors taxes over cap and trade....

Genuine Savings has emerged as the leading economic indicator of sustainable economic development at the country level. It derives from the literatures on weak sustainability, wealth accounting and national income accounting. The paper is structured as follows: section 1 introduces the basic...

Based on the theoretical background of the link between countries’ transparency and environmental policy our paper provides empirical evidence for a sample of 68 countries for the time period of 2001-2010. By assuming that countries’ transparency levels shape their environmental policy which...

Global climate change has a potentially large impact on economic growth but measuring their economic impact is subject to a great deal of uncertainty. The central objective of our paper is to set forth a model – the macroeconomics evaluation of climate change (MECC) model – to evaluate the...

This article puts forward an explanation of climate change within the context of global change. Climate change can be seen as the spearhead; as a manifestation of the increasing unsustainability of planet Earth. We consider some of the effects of this change, examining its uneven impact on...

This paper provides a conceptual review of the term “sustainable development”, bearing in mind its current applicability to social matters and public decision-making. Taking the well-known definition of sustainable development coined by the Brundtland Commission over twenty years ago, we...

In addition to its traditional purpose of producing food and raw materials, agriculture plays an important role in terms of supplying public goods, generally in the form of externalities deriving from farming activities. These goods may be predominantly economic and social –rural...

The paper shows the current state of environmental concerns in economic theory. Different economic schools have incorporated the environmental analysis into their theoretical framework. They use different presumptions, focus on different environmental aspects and come to diverse conclusions and...