In 1998 the Swedish government launched its largest ecological subsidization programme to date, the Local Investment Programme (LIP). By having two political objectives; to step up the pace at which Sweden transforms into an ecologically sustainable society and to reduce unemployment, the...

This paper empirically evaluates a Swedish government subsidy to environmental sustainability, the Local Investment Programme (LIP). During the programme period, 1998 - 2002, more than 670 million was granted to 1814 different municipal projects, making it the largest Swedish subsidization to...

We hypothesise that differences in people's attitudes and personality traits lead them to attribute varying importance to environmental considerations, safety, comfort, convenience and flexibility. Differences in personality traits can be revealed not only in the individuals' choice of...

Much of the debate on global climate change has focused on direct costs of mitigation. Recently this debate has included the issue of ancillary benefits. The present analysis incorporates a linkage between air pollution and ancillary health benefits into a general equilibrium model applied to...

The main objective of this paper is to test the Porter hypothesis by assessing static and dynamic effects of environmental policy on productivity. According to the hypothesis, stringent environmental regulations have dynamic effects on firm performance, and these effects eventually generate...

We provide a theoretical framework for measuring welfare when pollution influences economic growth by impairing health and driving up defensive medical expenditures. We demonstrate the usefulness of our framework in practice by applying it to data from Swedish valuation studies designed...

Harmonization of the instruments used in environmental policy has beenconsidered necessary to guarantee “fair” competition in internationalmarkets. We examine the economic costs of harmonizing paper recyclingstandards in countries where the urgency of the waste disposal problemsdiffer. Using...

A number of life-cycle assessment studies havecompared the environmental impacts of materialrecycling and incineration of waste paper. Theyhave shown that, in most cases, a recyclingscenario results in lower total energy use, butgreater use of fossil fuels. If waste paper andfossil fuels are...

In 1992, Sweden introduced a producer responsibility ordinance which explicitly states that sorted out, collected waste paper must be material recycled. Another alternative could be to recover energy by incineration. Material recycling was prioritized, although there is no environmental...