In the past there was hardly any use of economic instruments in environmental policy, mainly command and control measures were used. More recently, ecological taxes as well as tradable permits became more popular and voluntary agreements have been implemented. Using the Public Choice approach we...

The absence of costs of externalities generated in the environment by business operations results in suboptimal resource allocation in Pareto terms as well as in Kaldor-Hicks terms, the destruction of valuable natural areas and the reduction in biodiversity. The article examines the existing...

In this essay, three separate yet interconnected components of pro-environmental decision making are considered: knowledge, in the form of basic scientific understanding and procedural knowledge, risk perception, as it relates to an individual’s direct experience of climate change and...

This paper examines farm households' tree management strategies and proposes a framework for policy interventions. Farmers plant or retain some trees on their land nearly everywhere. Historically this component of on-farm resources has attracted little interest but practical policy measures can...

Dynamic optimization problems cover a large class of problems in theoretical and applied economics. A simple iterative algorithm with fast convergence is proposed. It is demonstrated that the algorithm in a few steps produce excellent analytic (closed form) approximations including error bounds...

The goal of this paper is to provide an investigation of several approaches to valuing ecosystem services and to contribute additional techniques which may be used in evaluating `green' GDP accounts. Our estimates focus on the ecosystem as a productive economic input, not a stock which is...

Uncertainties and risks in the decision making process are abundant in the area of environmental economics, irrespective of whether the problems being discussed are local or global. This paper uses laboratory evidence from public goods games to examine how in payoff equivalent situations,...

Planet earth is host to a dazzling variety of living organisms. This diversity of life, or – biodiversity, is vital to the survival and prosperity of humanity, supplying such vital amenities as food, clothing, shelter, natural biochemicals useful in medicine, industry, and agriculture, and...

This paper starts out from the optimistic assumption that the basic policies for environmental economic development are known but uncertainties surround the speed of their adoption. In many developing countries the key obstacle is poor governance: consequently, renewable resources continue to be...