Water is scarce in many countries. One instrument to improve the allocation of a scarce resource is (efficient) pricing or taxation. However, water is implicitly traded on international markets, particularly through food and textiles, so that impacts of water taxes cannot be studied in...

Marine and coastal ecosystems – and thus the benefits they create for humans – are subject to increasing pressures and competing usages. For this reason, the European Union (EU) adopted the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which is to guide future maritime policy in the EU and...

Ocean acidification is increasingly recognized as a major global problem. Yet economic assessments of its effects are currently almost absent. Unlike most other marine organisms, mollusks, which have significant commercial value worldwide, have relatively solid scientific evidence of biological...

In order to explore the impact of climate change on energy use, we estimate an energy demand model that is driven by temperature, prices and income. The estimation is based on an unbalanced panel of 62 countries over three decades. We limit the analysis to the residential sector and distinguish...

Approximately 80 percent of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to depend on the agricultural sector for their livelihoods, but-unlike in other regions of the world-agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by very low yields due to agroecological features, poor access to...

Because ocean acidification has only recently been recognized as a problem caused by CO2 emissions, impact studies are still rare and estimates of the economic impact are absent. This paper estimates the economic impact of ocean acidification on coral reefs which are generally considered to be...

This paper analyzes energy use and CO2 emissions of more than 78 000 German industrial plants between 1995 and 2006. It is the first study to exploit exceptionally rich energy data that were recently matched to official micro datasets. We document that both energy use and intensity are highly...

The Kiel Canal in Germany connects ports on the Baltic Sea with the rest of the world and is the most-used artificial waterway in the world. Despite this fact, it generates a balance sheet loss. Revenues, which are mainly generated by the transit charge, do not cover its operating expenses. This...

Water and agriculture are intrinsically linked. Water is essential for crop production and agriculture is the largest consumer of freshwater resources. However, this link is commonly ignored by economic models mainly because water use is not reported in the national economic accounts. Few...