Over the last two decades, China has sustained a rapid economic growth at about 8-10%, part of which is attributed to the positive total factor productivity (TFP) growth. However, this extraordinary economic performance has been accompanied by severe environmental pollution and associated health damage.

In developing countries, the rapid proliferation of informal firms – low-technology unlicensed micro-enterprises – is having significant environmental impacts. Yet environmental management authorities typically ignore such firms.

The regulation of industrial pollution is difficult in a rapidly industrialising, low-income setting. This study looks at the efforts to regulate chemical plants in Ankleshwar, the largest chemical estate in Asia.

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.

Global environmental problems are often assumed to imply extensive inefficiencies since there is no global authority corresponding to the government at a national level.

This paper shows, on the contrary, that rich countries in a free unregulated market may still undertake globally efficient abatement investments, given the existence of limited non-paternalistic altruism.

This paper presents an experimental study of two different pollution compliance games: collective vis-à-vis random fining as a means to regulate non-point pollution. Result suggests the importance of considering subject pool differences in the evaluation of environmental policies by means of experiments, particularly if those policies involve certain forms of management decisions.

This thesis consists of five papers dealing with fairly heterogeneous issues, based on the problems or topics analyzed, but also based on the methodologies used to approach them. The overriding motives are the design of environmental policies in the context of a typical developing country (where Costa Rica is used as a representative of such countries), and the study and application of techniques that can provide the necessary information for policy-making.

In this paper we investigate what effect political and economic freedom has on emissions of CO2. The estimated models predict that CO2 is always increasing in GDP even at high level of GDP, which confirms the results of earlier studies.