The eminent contributors (including Altshuler, Creedy, Freebairn, Gravelle, Heady, Kalb, Sørensen and Zodrow) investigate the beneficial directions for medium-term tax reform in the light of global developments and lessons from the latest taxation research. In addressing this issue, they review...

Motu is currently developing a dataset of production costs relating to different rural land uses, which we can use to help explain historical land-use trends at a Territorial Authority level. The Meat and Wool Economic Service farm survey provides a rich database containing physical and...

Motu is currently developing a dataset of production costs relating to different rural land uses, which we can use to help explain historical land-use trends at a Territorial Authority level. The Meat and Wool Economic Service farm survey provides a rich database containing physical and...

Water quality in many New Zealand waterways is currently declining leading to lakes and rivers being closed for contact recreation such as swimming and potentially threatening our clean, green image. Much of this decline is associated with an increase in the nutrient loss from agriculture in the...

An efficient housing market is of critical importance for individual welfare and for a well-functioning economy. We test the efficiency of this market by estimating the factors that determine both the long-run and the dynamic paths of regional house prices. Our tests use a new quarterly regional...

In this paper we estimate deforestation patterns (across time and 436 districts within Costa Rica) with an econometric method explicitly derived from a dynamic microeconomic model. While the underlying model is similar to that used by Stavins and Jaffe 1990, we use different econometric tools...

This paper tackles the complex issue of how buyers and sellers within a domestic carbon credit system designed to include regenerating indigenous forest would optimally design contracts for trades of the new good, “carbon sink credits”. The paper begins by briefly defining the constraints...

As tradeable permit programmes mature, two inter-related issues are becoming more critical in creating viable responses to a long-term, highly uncertain environmental problem such as climate change. First, we need to update policies in response to new information; and second, we need to design...

Tropical forests are estimated to release approximately 1.7 PgC per year as a result of deforestation. Avoiding tropical deforestation could potentially play a significant role in carbon mitigation over the next 50 years if not longer. Many policymakers and negotiators are skeptical of our...

Carbon sequestration in plantation forests provides the main means by which New Zealand will meet its international climate change obligations in the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2008–2012). However, without active policy, forests are unlikely to contribute as much in...