There have been occasional ad hoc efforts to influence consumer behaviour by the imposition of product taxes that reflect external costs imposed by such products that are not initially included in their price. In the spirit of this idea, in2002 Ireland introduced a 15 Euro cent tax on plastic...

The World Bank recently began publishing estimates of countries' “genuine savings”: a comprehensive measure of net investment across all forms of capital (natural and human as well as produced). This article presents the first empirical investigation of the consistency of the Bank's...

Economic theory predicts that the current change in national wealth, broadly defined to include natural and human capital as well as produced capital ("genuine savings"), determines whether the present value of future changes in consumption is positive or negative. Theoretical research has...

This paper is a first attempt to empirically measure transaction costs – a composite of administrativecosts and trading costs – of firms in the European Union's CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS)during its trial phase (2005-2007). This analysis provides some evidence that transaction...

The Emissions Trading scheme now (January 2003) in prospect in the European Union is likely to be the first trans-national greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme in the world. With the participation of the European Economic Area [EEA] countries and with the forthcoming EU enlargement, 30...

We use historical industrial emissions data to assess the level of abatement and overallocation that took place across European countries during the pilot phase (2005-2007)of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme. Using a dynamic panel data model, we estimate the counterfactual...