Putting a price on carbon is critical for climate change policy. Increasingly, policymakers combine multiple policy tools to achieve this, for example by complementing cap-and-trade schemes with a carbon tax, or with a feed-in tariff. Often, the motivation for doing so is to limit undesirable...

Cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gas emissions are an important part of the climate change policies of the EU, Japan, New Zealand, among others, as well as China (soon) and Australia (potentially). However, concerns have been raised on a variety of ethical grounds about the use of markets to...

Debate about the relationship between environmental limits and economic growth has been taking place for several decades. These arguments have re-emerged with greater intensity following advances in the understanding of the economics of climate change, increases in resource and oil prices and...

Many models of economic growth exclude materials, energy and other intermediate inputs from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate. This paper explores the relationship between intermediate input intensity,...

This paper analyses the design of carbon markets in time (intertemporally) and space (geographically) from first principles, starting initially with a relatively clean slate and asking what an optimal global carbon market would look like by around 2030. Our focus is on firmlevel trading systems,...

Conventional benefit-cost analysis incorporates the normally reasonable assumption that the policy or project under examination is marginal. In particular, it is assumed that the policy or project does not change the underlying growth rate of the economy. However, this assumption may be...

This paper examines the impact of electoral cycles and the introduction of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) policy upon the holding of small-scale mining property rights in Guyana. Mining is both the major cause of deforestation and the main economic activity in the...

Climate policy required that much of the world�s reserves of fossil fuels remain unburned. This paper makes the case for implementing this directly through policy to close the global coal industry. Coal is singled out because of its high emissions intensity, low rents per unit value, local...

The paper analyses the implications of landowners� option values in land allocation and derives policy recommendations for payments for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). Given that REDD will not represent a permanent change in the cumulative flux of carbon...

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion in the publication of country indexes that measure and rank the relative policy performances of governments. Whilst there is a well understood audience for such rankings amongst policy-makers and the media, much less is known about their use and...