Weak environmental regulatory institutions in developing countries often undermine conventional command-and-control pollution control policies. As a result, these countries are increasingly experimenting with alternative approaches aimed at leveraging nonregulatory “green” pressures applied by local communities, capital markets, and consumers.

Scholars have suggested that in China centralized environmental policymaking may be decoupled from idiosyncratic local implementation, and thus have questioned the outcomes. This paper fills a gap in the literature on China’s environmental governance by assessing the effects of the centralized regime on outcomes and diagnosing institutional deficiencies along the following three dimensions: structure, penetration to multiple actors in society, and persistence in efforts taken.

This paper is about locating sensors in water distribution networks and making inferences on the presence of contamination events based on sensor signals.

We use firm-level data to study the adoption of Environmental Management Practices (EMPs) in the most polluting industrial sectors in Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia during the 1990 – 1998 period when these countries were in a transition away from a centrally planned economy.

Ten years ago, there was hardly any environmental enforcement by civil society or by the markets in China. In 1999–2000, the World Bank collaborated on a pilot programme with the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, Nanjing University, the Zhenjiang Environmental Protection Bureau in Jiangsu Province and the Hohhot Academy of Environmental Sciences in Inner Mongolia.

The design of a sensor-placement scheme capable of detecting all possible contamination events for a water distribution system before consumers are put at risk is essentially impossible given current technologies and budgets.

The authors analyze how price-based and quantity-based emissions regulations affect compliance incentives and social welfare with incomplete enforcement and technology adoption.

This paper analyzes differences in firms’ responsiveness to PROPER, Indonesia’s public disclosure program for industrial pollution control. The overall effectiveness of this program at achieving emissions reductions and its low regulatory costs have earned it a good reputation around the world. PROPER had no deterrents or incentives other than those that arose indirectly from publicly disclosing information about the environmental performances of firms.

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.

Air pollution in urban China is increasingly attributed to dispersed sources such as motor vehicles and construction sites, over which environmental protection bureaus (EPBs) share jurisdiction with other government line agencies.