The Chinese leadership in November 2013 determined to embark upon a new wave of comprehensive reforms in China. This is clearly reflected by the key decision of the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of Communist Party of China to assign the market a decisive role in allocating...

Understanding companies’ preferences for various domestic policy instruments is crucial to designing and planning Sectoral Market Mechanism (SMM) in China. Based on a detailed overview of domestic policy instruments under SMM, this paper evaluates corporate preferences for diverse domestic...

China’s unilateral pledge to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45 percent by 2020 relative to its 2005 levels raises both the stringency issue, and given that China’s pledge is in the form of carbon intensity, reliability issues concerning China’s statistics on energy and GDP. Moreover, as...

Just prior to the Copenhagen climate summit, China pledged to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 relative to its 2005 levels to help to reach an international climate change agreement at Copenhagen or beyond. This raises the issue of whether such a pledge is ambitious or just represents...

As an important step towards building a “harmonious society” through “scientific development”, China has incorporated for the first time in its five-year economic plan an energy input indicator as a constraint. While it achieved a quadrupling of its GDP while cutting its energy intensity...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on regional–national disparities in environmental efficiency, based on case studies of Italy and the Lazio region, which includes the city of Rome. Shift-share analyses provide evidence on the drivers of environmental efficiency and on sector...

We investigate the relationships between water quality and socioeconomic factors in California at the county level for the years 1993 to 2006 using 24 water quality indicators coming from seven different types of water bodies. We estimate these relationships using three classes of models: the...