In this article, the likely effects of an environmental fiscal reform in Namibia are examined using a Computable General Equilibrium model. We find that a triple dividend—improving the environment, increasing employment, and reducing poverty at the same time—remains elusive.

This paper presents the application of an auction scheme for the allocation of funds for environmentally improving land use change (LUC) amongst farm households in Sichuan Province, China.

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.

Whether government has the political will and capacity to control pollution is crucial for environmental outcomes. A vast country such as China, with centralized policymaking but idiosyncratic local implementation of environmental regulations and drastic regional disparities in wealth, raises the question how does the central government stimulate local environmental commitment to accommodate such diversity?

Microcredit schemes have become a popular means of improving smallholders’ access to credit and making long term investment possible. However, it remains to be explored whether the current microcredit schemes are more successful than earlier formal small scale lending in identifying successful borrowers. We studied shrimp farming in a rural region in Bangladesh where formal microlending is well established, but where more expensive informal microlending coexists with the formal schemes.

This paper takes as its starting point the observation that fuel prices – and thus taxes – are important for good management of climate change and other environmental problems. To economists this should be no surprise yet it seems that the role of fuel taxation as an instrument of climate policy has not been fully appreciated. It is however one of the few policy instruments that, since several decades, has actually reduced fuel consumption appreciably.

This book by Thomas Sterner and Jessica Coria is an attempt to encourage more widespread and careful use of economic policy instruments. The book compares the accumulated experiences of the use of economic policy instruments in the U.S. and Europe, as well as in rich and poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ambitious in scope, it discusses the design of instruments that can be employed in any country in a wide range of contexts, including transportation, industrial pollution, water pricing, waste, fisheries, forests, and agriculture.

We study the cost-effectiveness of inducing compliance in a program that caps aggregate emissions of a given pollutant from a set of heterogeneous firms based on emissions standards and the relative cost-effectiveness of such a program with respect to an optimally designed program based on tradable discharge permits. Our analysis considers abatement, monitoring and sanctioning costs, as well as perfect and imperfect information on the part of the regulator with regard to the polluters’ abatement costs.

State-owned forest enterprises (SOFEs) in northeast China and Inner Mongolia play important roles both in timber production and in the maintenance of ecological security. However, since the late 1970s, forest resource and economic crises have seriously restricted these functions.

Advocates claim that voluntary programs can help shore up poorly performing command-and-control environmental regulation in developing countries. Although literature on this issue is quite thin, research on voluntary environmental programs in industrialized countries suggests that they are sometimes ineffective because they mainly attract relatively clean plants free-riding on prior pollution control investments.