This study undertakes a decomposition analysis to identify the drivers of carbon emissions change in the Swedish business and industry sectors 1993 - 2006. On aggregate, energy intensity decreased, but this does not seem to have been very important for reducing emissions. Rather, fuel substitution seems to have been more important, which is in line with findings from the decomposition literature on Sweden.

This book is the final report from the World Bank's SEA pilot program. It presents the findings and recommendations of the evaluation of the Pilot Program which comprised six SEA pilots on sector reforms in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone, West Africa, Bangladesh and China.

Because conventional command-and-control environmental regulation often performs poorly in developing countries, policymakers are increasingly experimenting with alternatives, including voluntary regulatory programs. Research in industrialized countries suggests that such programs are sometimes ineffective, because they mainly attract relatively clean participants free-riding on unrelated pollution control investments.

China began enforcing a system of pollution levies in 1982. However, senior environmental officials expressed doubt that this system was improving the environment and, in 1996, they began to place greater reliance on mill closure as the penalty for poor environmental performance. Since then, managers have found means of subverting many of the intended mill closures, and this causes us to return to the question of the abatement efficiency and effectiveness of the levies.

The purpose of this report is to build knowledge about the effects of the development of regional and international carbon markets and the auxiliary technology agreements that might be needed.

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.

We estimate productivity growth for 33 industries covering the entire Chinese economy using a time series of input-output tables covering 1982-2000.

Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms’ environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting.

The authors use detailed plant-level survey data to evaluate the impact of India’s Green Rating Project (GRP) on the environmental performance of the country’s largest pulp and paper plants.

Analysis of the differences in firms’ responsiveness to PROPER (Indonesia’s successful public disclosure program for industrial pollution control) showed that foreign-owned firms and firms in densely populated areas were more likely to respond to public environmental ratings. Firms with bad environmental performances felt pressure to improve, but this incentive diminished after the initial abatement steps.

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.