We study the design of an economic incentive based program – a subsidy – to induce adoption of more efficient technology in a pollution reduction program in southern Chile. Stated preferences methods, contingent valuation (CV), and choice experiment (CE) are used to estimate the probability of adoption and the willingness to share the cost of a new technology by a household. The cost-effectiveness property of different subsidy schemes is explored numerically for different regulatory objectives.

We analyze the performance of the Federal Industrial Inspection Program operated by the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) in Mexico City. We seek to answer three questions: What drives the inspections? What determines non-compliance? And what drives imposition of fines? We use firm-level data that identify certain characteristics of the firms, PROFEPA's inspections, compliance results and fines for all air polluting firms under the Program during the period January 2000–October 2008. We obtain three main results.

We study the effect of a household subsidy to induce the adoption of more efficient and less polluting wood combustion technologies. We compare, through numerical simulations, several subsidy designs with respect to the impact on aggregate emissions, costs, and cost-effectiveness indicators. Two variables that turn out to be important for the performance of a subsidy program are the remaining time that an existing equipment can be used and the access of the households to credit to fund the co-payment of the equipment.

Climate change and escalating environmental degradation risk becoming key constraints to economic growth and human development. Poor women and men in developing and transitional countries are disproportionally affected by pollution, land degradation and other environmental problems due to high dependence on natural resources and high exposure to risks. Managing the environment is important for the well-being of all citizens, particularly for the least well-off.

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. 

Climate change and escalating degradation of ecosystem services place the need for greening economic growth on the international policy agenda. To make growth greener and more inclusive, it is crucial to change the institutions and incentive structures in national sector reforms and to involve poor and vulnerable groups in decision making.

Recent assessment reports emphasise that the impacts of climate change and escalating environmental degradation risk becoming key constraints to economic growth and poverty reduction in many poor countries (e.g. World Bank, 2010; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). While various global, regional and national commitments to

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 examine the control of air pollution caused by households burning wood for heating and cooking in the developing world. Since the problem is one of controlling emissions from nonpoint sources, regulations are likely to be directed at household choices of wood consumption and combustion technologies. Moreover, these choices are subtractions from, or contributions to, the pure public good of air quality. Consequently, the efficient policy design is not independent of the distribution of household income.

We estimate the implicit prices of the crime rate and airborne pollution in Chile, using spatially compensating price differentials in the housing and labor markets. We evaluate empirically the impact of different estimation strategies for the wage and rent equations, on the economic value of these two amenities. The results show that increments in the crime rate or in air pollution have a negative impact on welfare and that the estimated welfare measures and their variances are sensitive to selection bias, endogenous amenities and clustering effects.