A number of countries face water shortages because they need to make some basic changes in their water management. Policy options do exist. Most of them share the objective of treating water and water services as an economic good, by regulating private inefficient appropriation of open-access...

The aim of this paper is to provide a review of policy instruments aimed at controlling pollution from agricultural diffuse sources, and compare their pros and cons. The review also includes a description of instruments introduced through recent reforms of the European Common Agricultural Policy...

This paper investigates the implications of progressively broadening the scope of the market of tradable permits from no emissions trading to full global trading. We start with the no emissions trading case where each Annex I country must individually meet its Kyoto targets. Next, we consider a...

Experience with existing multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) shows that trade measures agreed to within the MEAs themselves may not necessarily lead to a dispute between parties. On the contrary, there is a great chance that disputes may arise from national measures undertaken to fulfil...

We develop a framework to analyze urban water tariff setting and its welfare implications and apply it to a panel of cities in the People's Republic of China in the 2000s. First, we find that peer cities' water tariff levels have a significant influence on a city's choice of tariffs. We use the...

We investigate whether the future relationships between several pollutants and per capita income in rich countries may assume the inverted U-forms of Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC). The emission-augmenting effect of scaling up aggregate economic activity may be counteracted by greener...

Many economists maintain that environmental regulations hamper productivity growth. However, recently, an opposing view has gained advocates. Indeed, it has been suggested that the empirically detected inverse relationship between environmental regulations and productivity growth is an almost...

According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) literature, several mechanisms within rich economies, including increased willingness to conduct abatement policies, contribute to reduce environmental problems. Unilateral environmental policies in open economies may affect other countries...

It has been claimed that good environmental performance can improve firms' economic performance. However, because of e.g. data limitations, the methods applied in most previous quantitative empirical studies of the relationship between environmental and economic performance of firms suffer from...

Pollution intensive production can be avoided domestically by increased imports and less exports of dirty products. Such trade effects may imply more emissions abroad, or pollution leakages. We study whether such leakages may contribute to the observed inverted relationship between emissions and...