A small open economy operates a carbon emission trading scheme and subsidizes green energy. Taking cap-and-trade as given, we seek to explain the subsidy as the outcome of a trilateral tug of war between the "green" energy industry, the "black" energy industry and consumers. With parametric...

Although gasoline taxes are widely used (nearly) efficient CO2 emission controls, additional fuel-efficiency regulation is applied e.g. in the USA and in Europe. In a simple analytical model, we specify the welfare implications of (i) gasoline taxes, (ii) of 'gas-guzzler taxes' (iii) of...

In the environmental economics literature the standard approach of modeling nonlinear production and abatement processes is to treat waste emissions "simply as another factor of production" (Cropper and Oates 1992). That approach doesn't map the materials flow involved completely and hides,...

The basic focus of this paper is to look at ecological tax reform from a public good perspective rather than from a Pigouvian externality cum tax reform perspective. Our point of departure is the insight, aptly expressed by Heller and Starrett (1976, p. l 0), e. g., that "one can think of...

This paper deals with two different types of irreversibility: Pollution irreversibility occurs if the stock of pollution cannot be reduced (any more) by nature's assimilative capacity; characteristics irreversibility occurs when some characteristic of the environmental resource is irreversibly...

Früher waren Assimilationsdienste von Gewässern wie andere natürliche Ressourcen freie Güter in dem Sinn, daß ihr Angebot trotz unentgeltlicher Nutzung die Nachfrage überstieg; die Nutzung zum Nullpreis war effizient. Die zunehmende konkurrierende Nutzung als unbezahlter Produktionsfaktor...

This is a comment on Urs Schweizer's paper with the above title presented at the International Seminar on the New Institutional Economics in Wallerfangen, May/June 1989. After focusing on problems in selecting rules and outcomes of rules, it discusses the Buchanan-Tullock issue of...