Why did the climate negotiations in The Hague fail? Our contribution is to argue that the conflict between the European Union and the United States stems mainly from disagreement on the cost issue. We argue that three main concerns promoted by the European Union in The Hague, i.e. a 50% national...

The purpose of this article is to analyse whether the presence of surplus emission allowance trading jeopardizes the environmental target of an international environmental agreement. We argue that surplus emission allowance trading can be used as an implicit side-payment mechanism to actually...

CDM projects have large potentials but also face significant obstacles that have so far limited their applicability. Two serious problems that an effective contracting faces are the presence of private information and the lack of sufficiently precise output measures. In a principal-agent...

Why has the EU been so eager to continue the climate negotiations? Can it be solely attributed to the <p> EU feeling morally obliged to be the main initiator of continued progress on the climate change <p> negotiations, or can industrial interests in the EU, at least partly, explain the behaviour of...</p></p>

The political economy idea developed by Ackerman and Hassler (1981) is the starting point of this <p> paper. It suggested that a coalition of environmentalists and industrialists successfully lobbied the <p> US Congress. More strict technology-based standards for new sources than existing sources was...</p></p>

The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether the presence of Hot Air trading jeopardizes the environmental target of an international environmental agree-ment. We argue that Hot Air can be used as an implicit side-payment mecha-nism to actually bring about higher environmental protection...

Based on the political support function model by Hillman (1982), we consider the choice of policy instruments in environmental regulation. More specifically, we extend the Hillman model so that it can incorporate the connection between the relative strength of lobby groups, the chosen level of...

Our theoretical model suggests that ‘bureaucratisation’ is a potential threat to future economic growth in the EU. The bureaucratic incentives to budget maximize leads to overwhelming pressure for new administrative tasks because bureaucracies are competing for resources just like fishermen...