In contrast with what we perceive is the conventional wisdom about setting a second-best emissions tax to control a uniformly mixed pollutant under uncertainty, we demonstrate that setting a uniform tax equal to expected marginal damage is not generally efficient under incomplete information about firms’ abatement costs and damages from pollution.

Raising the price of fossil fuels is a key component of any effective policy to deal with climate change. Just how effective such policies are is decided by the price elasticities of demand.

The author looks at the effects of the choice between taxes and permits on the pattern of adoption of a new emissions abatement technology. The regulator determines the optimal ex-post amount of emissions before firms start to adopt the technology. Each firm decides when to adopt, considering benefits, costs, and advantage gained over their rivals, producing a sequence of adoption that is “diffused” into the industry over time.

This paper describes an integrated modeling approach to combine a top-down, recursive CGE model with a bottom-up, electricity-sector model to simulate two categories of policies.

Raising the price of fossil fuels is a key component of any effective policy to deal with climate change. Just how effective such policies are is decided by the price elasticities of demand. Many papers have studied this without recognising that not only is there a demand side response: quantities are decided by the price but also there is a reverse causality: the level of consumtion affects the political acceptability of the taxes which are the main component of the final price.

Empirical evidence suggests that people’s risk-perceptions are often systematically biased. This paper develops a simple framework to analyse public policy when this is the case.

Using nationally representative data, the present paper examines the impact of China's ongoing rural tax reform on farmers. The difficulties in further local governance restructuring are also discussed.

Increasing block tariffs (IBTs), widely used in the developing world, are claimed to produce desirable income transfers, discourage wasteful use, promote economic efficiency, and assure access to sufficient water for basic sanitation. In fact, these claims are either excessive or incorrect. In practice, IBTs are likely to promote inefficiency, inequity, unfairness, net revenue instability, and other negative consequences. An alternative tariff design, a uniform price with rebate (UPR), is presented.

This article shows that fuel taxes serve a very important role for the environment and that we risk a backlash of increased emissions if they are abolished.

In this paper, we discuss the effect of refunding environmental charges.