Polluting firms must have the willingness, opportunity, and capacity or capability to undertake technological changes to improve their environmental performance. These changes could involve the adoption (diffusion) of already-proven technologies, or require incremental to radical innovation....

Voluntary agreements are an important environmental policy instrument. In the paper some examples are discussed and the structure and mechanisms of voluntary agreements are analyzed using a strategic game approach. In the simple strategic game with only one abatement technology, there is a...

This paper is the keynote speech delivered by Professor William Baumol at the First World Congress of Environmental Economists that was held in Venice on June 25-27, 1998. It analyses the situation of the environment under different economic regimes: the feudal society, Marxism and capitalism....

This study compares the environmental impacts of urban public transport and automobiles (energy use, emissions, noise nuisance, waste materials and use of space). For this purpose two models have been developed FACTS-Urban (Forecasting air pollution by car traffic simulation) and MILOV...

The paper examines the determinants that influence the environmental innovation behaviour of companies in Germany in a multivariate context by using data from the Mannheimer Innovations Panel 1993, which was part of the Community Innovation Survey. The objective is to analyse the general...

This report summarises the main ideas, proposals, scientific achievements, consensus and conflicting issues that emerged at the Second EFIEA Policy Workshop, held at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Palazzo delle Stelline, Corso Magenta 63, Milan, Italy, March 4th-6th, 1999. EFIEA, the European...

The levels of public goods provided by government are determined in part by the form of political institutions in a country. Countries governed by democratic institutions arguably will provide public goods at different levels than countries ruled by autocrats or an elite group. To examine this...

If the precautionary principle must become the guide of the international community for environmental protection policies, an economic interpretation of the principle is in order. The analysis of case studies and a survey of the recent decision theoretic literature show on the one hand, the...

Why do Scandinavian countries perform better in terms of environmental protection than other European Union countries? In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that societies characterised by low-income inequality (such as the Nordic European countries) generate political-economic equilibria...

This paper analyses budget-constrained, nonpoint source (NPS) pollution control with costly information acquisition and learning. To overcome the inherent ill-posed statistical problem in NPS pollution data the sequential entropy filter is applied to the sediment load management program for...