Implementation and management of an ITQ fishery involves significant and costly administrative activities. These activities include formulating and implementing policy rules, monitoring and enforcement to deter illegal behavior, and economic and marine research. In this article we construct a model of a competitive ITQ system to analyze how the distribution of administrative costs between the public and a fishing industry can affect the equilibrium in the quota market, including equilibrium level of administrative costs, and derive results about the optimal distribution of these costs.

All environmental policies involve costs of implementation and management that are distinct from pollution sources’ abatement costs. In practice, regulators and sources usually share these administrative costs. We examine theoretically an optimal policy consisting of an emissions tax and the distribution of administrative costs between the government and regulated sources of pollution. Our focus is on the optimal distribution of administrative costs between polluters and the government and the optimal level of the emissions tax in relation to marginal pollution damage.

Illegal hunting is a threat to wildlife conservation. The motivations for poaching and its possible effects are variable and have not been extensively studied. Applying an economic theoretical-conceptual frame, we analyze the different factors that may determine illegal hunting and discuss some policy implications.

The paper discusses the application of Elinor Ostrom’s Social Ecological Systems (SES) framework, using as example a community organization in Costa Rica, which collectively extracts turtle eggs.

Patterns of forest cover and forest degradation determine the size and types of ecosystem services forests provide. Particularly in low-income countries, nontimber forest product (NTFP) extraction by rural people, which provides important resources and income to the rural poor, contributes to the level and pattern of forest degradation.

We study the cost effectiveness property of different control strategies for improving environmental quality. Our prospective analysis considers the application of Transferable Emissions Permit System (TEPS), Transferable Ambient Permit System (TAPS) and Standards (STD) applied on fix sources in Bogota-Colombia. A numerical simulation model allowed us to obtain costs of each regulatory system, which were compared with associated urban environmental quality. The results show that the most cost effective regulation for any environmental quality goal is TEPS, followed by TAPS and finally STD.

We study the cost-effectiveness of inducing compliance in a program that caps aggregate emissions of a given pollutant from a set of heterogeneous firms based on emissions standards and the relative cost-effectiveness of such a program with respect to an optimally designed program based on tradable discharge permits. Our analysis considers abatement, monitoring and sanctioning costs, as well as perfect and imperfect information on the part of the regulator with regard to the polluters’ abatement costs.

State-owned forest enterprises (SOFEs) in northeast China and Inner Mongolia play important roles both in timber production and in the maintenance of ecological security. However, since the late 1970s, forest resource and economic crises have seriously restricted these functions.

Private sector initiatives certifying that producers of goods and services adhere to defined environmental process standards are increasingly popular worldwide. According to proponents, they can circumvent chronic barriers to effective public sector environmental regulation in developing countries.

We evaluate the factors that influence the reported level of pollution and those referred to the compliance with the payment of discharge fees from sources regulated under the Colombia’s Discharge Fee Program. The analysis uses a data set that contains information at plant level and considers individual sources operating under the jurisdiction of the Regional Autonomous Corporation of the Chivor (Corpochivor), for period 2001-2006.