While international trade can offer gains from specialisation and access to a wider range of products, it is also closely interlinked with global environmental problems, above all, anthropogenic climate change. This survey provides a structured overview of the economic literature on the...

For a large sample of enterprises in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (the "DACH" region) we study the impact of policy instruments such as energy-related taxes, subsidies, standards and negotiated agreements, or other regulations on the firm's ecological and economic performance. To identify...

Economic literature generally favours market-based instruments for regulating environmental externalities since they ensure compliance at the least cost to society. Emission taxes have been increasingly introduced internationally, with the focus shifting to CO2 after the adoption of the Kyoto...

While environmental taxes aim at making environmentally harmful behaviour more costly, the opposite is true for environmentally beneficial tax incentives. Tax incentives imply foregone public revenues to favour less polluting consumption and investment activities in order to achieve...

As governments spend unprecedented sums of public money on pandemic related rescue and recovery measures, while humankind is facing mounting long-term challenges - and above all the climate crisis -, the question whether and to what extent COVID-19 recovery programmes contribute to countries'...