One crucial precondition for the overall achievement of the Kyoto Protocol by 2010 is the participation of the USA. According to political economy theory, big countries have the strongest incentives to provide global collective good provisions. Reality, however, does not seem to follow this...

The EU has committed itself to meet an 8% greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target level following the Kyoto agreement. Therefore, the EU Commission has just proposed a new directive establishing a framework for GHG emissions trading within the European Union. This proposal is the outcome of a...

Summary: <p> A new and remarkable Green Paper about how to trade Greenhouse gases (GHG) in the EU has recently been published by the Commission of the European Union. This to achieve the stated 8% reduction target level. The Green Paper raises ten questions about how greenhouse gas permit trading...</p>

In order to explain excess co-operation in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma game, we first question the standard assumption of stable and selfish preferences by introducing the concept of social capital. This analysis leads to a model that explains excess co-operation through an accumulation of...

Based on institutional economics, the paper develops a new model pointing at two main reasons why Scandinavia is doing so well in economic terms, namely the level of decentralisation and social capital in its broad sense. The idea in the model is that a political system, which decentralises...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a standard method of measurement for social capital. Various <p> authors have investigated the influence of social capital on economic growth but still social capital has <p> not been measured in any satisfactory way. So far, each survey has used its own ad hoc...</p></p>