We demonstrate how the presence of an untaxed informal sector can sharply lower the cost of environmental and energy tax policy. The mechanism involves substitution between formal and informal labor supply: energy or environmental taxes can improve the efficiency of the tax system by drawing activity into the formal sector.

A driving restriction policy, as a control-and-command rationing measure, is a politically acceptable policy tool to address traffic congestion and air pollution in some countries and cities. Beijing was the first city in China to implement this policy. A one-day-a-week driving restriction scheme was expected to take 20 percent of cars off the road every weekday.

Hypothetical bias is one of the main issues bedeviling the field of nonmarket valuation. The general criticism is that survey responses reflect how people would like to behave, rather than how they actually behave. In our study of climate change and carbon emissions reductions, based on the increasing bulk of evidence from psychology and economics regarding the effects of making promises, we investigate the effect of an oath script in a contingent valuation survey.

This book is a remarkable case study of an environmental policy initiative for a national environmental regulatory system in the information age. In 1995 the Indonesian Ministry of Environment took the bold step to launch an environmental disclosure initiative called the Program for Pollution Control, Evaluation and Rating (PROPER). Under PROPER, environmental performance of companies is mapped into a five-color grading scale – Gold for excellent, Green for very good, Blue for good, Red for non-compliance, and Black for causing environmental damage.

We estimated a hazard function for the duration of micro-enterprises after they had been subject to a public seed financing programme in southern Chile.

Using a sequential discrete choice experiment, we investigate preferences for distributing the economic burden of reducing CO2 emissions in the two largest CO2-emitting countries: the United States and China.

Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience.

Climate change represents a serious threat to the economic growth potential in low income countries. Instead of investing in growth, they may be drawn into strife and conflict. Climate change and the global politics to deal with it, could however also present a number of interesting opportunities for developing countries.

The term decoupling refers to breaking the link between ‘environmental bads’ and ‘economic goods.’ Decoupling environmental pressures from economic growth is one of the main objectives of the OECD Environmental Strategy for the First Decade of the 21st Century, adopted by OECD Environment Ministers in 2001.

The aim of this chapter is to address the question whether there is a separate contribution from environmental taxation to decoupling and to offer researchers some guidance on how to optimally address this question.