The US Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulation mandates, subject to a civil penalty, producers to achieve a certain fleet average fuel economy on sales of new passenger cars. Analysing the incentive effects of CAFE, we find that it affords differential tax treatment to car models with...

Both the mining and the burning of coal is pollutive, so one might expect to observe taxes on coal production and consumption. Yet several countries in Western Europe subsidize coal production, and most East European countries subsidize coal consumption. The first part of this paper shows that...

Unilateral second-best carbon taxes are analysed in a two-period, two-country model with international trade in final goods, oil and bonds. Acceleration of global warming resulting from a future carbon tax is large if the price elasticities of oil demand are large and that of oil supply is...

The optimal reaction to a pending productivity shock of which the expected arrival time increases with global warming is to accumulate more precautionary capital to smooth consumption and to levy a carbon tax, proportional to the marginal hazard of a catastrophe, to curb the risk of climate...

This Paper analyses the relationship between different equity rules and the incentives to sign and ratify a climate agreement. A widespread conjecture suggests that a more equitable distribution of the burden of reducing emissions would enhance the incentives for more countries – particularly...

Natural resources account for 20% of world trade, and dominate the exports of many countries. Policy is used to manipulate both international and domestic prices of resources, yet this policy is largely outside the disciplines of the WTO. The instruments used include export taxes, price...

The political economy of resource rich countries is surveyed. The empirical evidence suggests that countries with a large share of primary exports in GNP have bad growth records and high inequality, especially if the quality of institutions and the rule of law are bad. The economic argument that...

Where imports are financed predominantly by rents from resource extraction or aid, the revenue generated by tariffs is illusory. Revenue earned by the tariff is offset by a reduction in the real value of aid and resource rents. Revenue is however moved between accounts in the government budget,...

While environmental and labour issues are not new to the GATT, nor to other trade policy fora, they are likely to have a more prominent role in trade policy discussions in the years ahead for the newly formed World Trade Organization (WTO). Many developing countries perceive the entwining of...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can reduce investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in...