One of the central tenets of this book is that governmental policies must be designed to take into account market characteristics and environmental phenomena - simultaneously. This volume contains a new research effort of the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei' and explores the theoretical underpinnings of environmental policy in a sub-optimal world.
Topics considered link economic issues (oligopolistic market structures, firm heterogeneity, and the strategic behavior of governments) to environmental issues (emission abatements, cleaner technologies, and environmental taxation).
The...

Climate change is one of the major environmental concern of many countries in the world. Negotiations to control potential climate changes have been taking place, from Rio to Kyoto, for the last five years. There is a widespread consciousness that the risk of incurring in relevant economic and environmental losses due to climate change is high. Scientific analyses have become more and more precise on the likely impacts of climate change. According to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, current trends in greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions may indeed...

Efficiency and Equity of Climate Change Policy is a comprehensive assessment of the economic effects of climate change policy, addressing the issues with a quantitative modelling approach. The book thus goes beyond the usual statements on the efficiency of economic instruments to identify the way gains and losses are distributed; who gains and who loses. Both the costs and benefits of climate change policies are analyzed. Most papers also provide useful information on the economic features of the Kyoto Protocol, its possible extensions, and the effect of different implementation...

Recent changes in the world effected by the transformations of information technology, globalisation, and the move towards a knowledge economy over the last thirty years have been as radical and fundamental as the changes resulting from the invention of the wheel and the printing press. We are now living in a new age in which the demands are so complex, so multifarious and so rapidly changing that the only way in which we shall be able to survive them is by committing to a process of individual, communal, and global learning throughout the lifespan of all of us.
A number of...

The idea of optimization runs through most parts of control theory. The simplest optimal controls are preplanned (programmed) ones. The problem of constructing optimal preplanned controls has been extensively worked out in literature (see, e. g., the Pontrjagin maximum principle giving necessary conditions of preplanned control optimality). However, the concept of op timality itself has a restrictive character: it is limited by what one means under optimality in each separate case. The internal contradictoriness of the preplanned control optimality ("the better is the enemy of the good")...

Forest vegetation is distributed in monsoon Asia continuously from boreal forests through temperate to tropical rain forests. This vegetation - the richest in the world - is being subjected to global change on an unprecedented scale. It has been predicted that boreal forests will experience the most significant change in response to global warming, while tropical forests are endangered by rapid changes in land use due to high population pressure. An increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentration will severely affect ecosystem function in this area. This volume presents a review of...