Developing countries, particularly those in Asia, are fast adopting industrial pollution control standards similar to those in developed countries. However, formal regulation has been greatly hampered by the absence of clear and legally binding rules; limited institutional capacity; lack of appropriate equipment and trained personnel; and inadequate information on emissions. At present, the gov...

Will economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development? This paper presents a simple household-choice framework that emphasizes the tradeoff between pollution-causing consumption and pollution-reducing abatement expenditures. The framework yields a simple explanation for Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKCs, i.e. non-monotonic, upward-turning paths of environment while de...

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria. The isocline for the stock of pollution features two stable branches, a good and a bad one. Assuming that the ecology is initially located on the upper (bad) branch of the isocline, the ecological equilibrium is hysteretic and a suitably designed temporary a...

After examining the properties of several alternative forms of marketable permit systems for the control of air pollution, this paper proposes a system of pollution offsets as the most promising approach. Under the pollution-offset scheme, sources of emissions are free to trade emissions permits subject to the constraint of no violations of the predetermined air-quality standard at any receptor...

Empirical evidence evaluating the e¢ciency of economic instruments is still rare, despite signi...cant theoretical advances over the last decades. The purpose of the paper is to evaluate one form of environmental taxation, the French tax on air pollution from 1990-99. While starting out in 1985 as a tax levied only on sulphur emissions, the tax base was subsequently extended to encompass also e...

This paper presents a survey of methods of regulations with focus on pollution abatement and of various approaches to the issue of measuring quantities such as the marginal benefit of improved health that are crucial in view of implementing the regulation. Since pollution is a public bad, in general the efficient level of pollution can only be reached by way of some sort of public intervention....

In this paper we consider the dynamic behavior of a firm that is subject to environmental regulation. It is assumed that, in order to prevent firms from polluting the environment excessively, the government imposes an emissions tax. We determine how an emissions tax influences the firm's decisions concerning investments and abatement efforts. In the model we incorporate the realistic property t...

In recent years, the demand for the use of sustainable and eco-friendly environmental processes is rapidly growing subjected to economic, public, and legislation pressure. Biotechnology provides a plethora of opportunities for effectively addressing issues pertaining to the monitoring, assessment, modeling, and treatment of contaminated water, air, and solid waste streams. In this context, sour...

This paper presents an incentive scheme to control agricultural non-point-source pollution. The analysis is based on a nested agent framework with three parties; farmers, a country’s government, and the governments of all countries that affect each other’s environmental quality. Unlike previous analysis of incentive schemes to control agricultural pollution, we suggest non-individual contracts ...