Many cities worldwide have considered vehicle restriction policies to curb proliferating problems related to traffic and pollution.

At the beginning of 2011, Beijing became the first city to allocate vehicle license plates using a lottery. We provide a background on Beijing׳s lottery and analyze its short-term effects. We find that growth in new vehicle registrations has been sharply curtailed. However, this policy may not reduce fuel consumption as much as expected.

Access related discussion paper here.

Many cities worldwide have considered vehicle restriction policies to curb proliferating problems of traffic and pollution.

At the beginning of 2011, Beijing became the first city to allocate vehicle license plates using a lottery. We provide background on Beijing’s lottery, and analyze its short-term effects. We find that vehicle growth has been sharply curtailed, and congestion has been reduced.  However, this policy may not reduce fuel consumption as much as expected.

This disucssion paper has been peer-reviewed. Access it here.

Most studies suggest that environmental taxes are regressive, making them less attractive policy options. The general objective of this paper is to analyze and compare fossil fuel and food tax incidence in Ethiopia in different expenditure groups of households considering urban and rural parts of Ethiopia separately.

We conclude that distributional concerns need not rule out using fuel taxes to address pressing public health and safety problems, particularly if gasoline and diesel taxes can be differentiated.

This paper analyzes how fossil fuel-producing countries can counteract climate policy. We analyze the exhaustion of oil resources and the subsequent transition to a backstop technology as a strategic game between the consumers and producers of oil, which we refer to simply as ‘OECD’ and ‘OPEC’, respectively.

Africa has considerable reserves of fossil fuels of all kinds: oil, coal and natural gas. Much of this resource is either utilised outside of Africa or some of the resource is not developed at all for use within the continent. Meanwhile, there are concerns that the future of fossil fuel use will need to take place in the context of a low carbon development pathway.

This is a chapter in a book entitled "Fuel Tax and the Poor: The Distributional Effects of Gasoline Taxation and Their Implications for Climate Policy" edited by Thomas Sterner, 2011.