Concern about sustainability helped to launch a new agenda for development and environmental economics and challenged many of the fundamental goals and assumptions of the conventional, neoclassical economics of growth and development. We review 25 years' of refereed journal articles on the...

We analyse the long-term efficiency of the emissions target and of the provisions to reduce carbon leakage in the Australian Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, as proposed in March 2009, and the nature and likely cause of changes to these features in the previous year. The target...

To maximise the economic benefits of tradable emission permits or emission taxes, while keeping these emission pricing mechanisms politically acceptable, requires the use of payment thresholds. There is no other way to avoid the "rock versus hard place" dilemma posed by the standard, polar forms...

A general proposal is made for initially distributing the total value of tradeable carbon permits in a developed country, which tries to balance allocative and informational efficiency, political acceptability, and equity. Because of the macroeconomic significance of carbon, the proposal is...

Effective climate policy requires global emissions of greenhouse gases to be cut substantially, which can be achieved by energy supply technologies with lower emissions, greater energy use efficiency, and substitution in demand. For policy to be efficient requires fairly uniform, fairly...

We consider a closed, constant-technology, capital-resource economy with resource stock amenity value, which would otherwise aim for conventionally, PV-optimal development that maximises the present value of utility using a constant discount rate. In this economy, we calculate the decentralised...

Effective climate policy requires global emissions of greenhouse gases to be cut substantially, which in energy sectors can be achieved by lower emissions supply technologies, greater energy use efficiency, and substitution in demand. For policy to be efficient requires fairly uniform, pervasive...

We thank two anonymous referees and the Department of Climate Change for helpful comments. This research was supported financially by the Environmental Economics Research Hub of the Australian Government's Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities program.

We compare three different views on the long run efficiencies of emission taxes which include thresholds, and of tradable emission permits where some permits are initially free. The differences are caused by different assumptions about whether thresholds and free permits should be subsidies...

We give empirical welfare results for global greenhouse gas emission control, using the first multiparty model to combine tax-versus-trading under uncertainties with revenue recycling. Including multiple parties greatly reduces the welfare advantage of an emissions tax over emissions (permit)...