This paper explores the relationships among economic development, energy consumption, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by focusing on a set of advanced economies, the U.S. states. Energy consumption and emissions grew 50–60 percent on average over the 1960–1999 period. The states’ per...

Understanding and considering the distribution of per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is important in designing international climate change proposals and incentives for participation. I evaluate historic international emissions distributions and forecast future distributions to assess...

This paper conducts Granger-causality tests on real per capita GDP and four types of air emissions (CO2, CO, SO2 and NOx) by using Norwegian data covering the period 1973-2003. The test results indicate that only unidirectional causal relationships exist between GDP and air emissions. For CO2...

Colombia’s discharge fee system for water effluents is often held up as a model of a well-functioning, economic-incentive pollution control program in a developing country. Yet few objective, up-to-date evaluations of the program have appeared. Based on a variety of primary and secondary...

Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms’ environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting....

We evaluate the approach currently used by the World Bank to measure exposure to outdoor air pollution and associated economic costs, as reported in the World Development Indicators database. We recommend that current exposure estimates, based on an econometric model, be replaced by estimates...

This paper provides evidence that China's system of tax revenue sharing is an important explanation for differences in the rate of sewage treatment plant construction among its cities. As a result of the 1994 tax reform, Chinese cities retained different shares of their value-added tax (VAT)....

The city of León, Guanajuato, is Mexico’s leather goods capital and a notorious environmental hotspot. Over the past two decades, four high-profile voluntary agreements aimed at controlling pollution from León’s tanneries have yielded few concrete results. To understand why, this paper...

In many developing countries, a host of financial, institutional, and political factors hamstring conventional environmental regulation. Given these constraints, a promising strategy for controlling pollution is to promote the voluntary adoption of clean technologies. Although this strategy has...

Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms’ environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting....