In recent years, voluntary approaches to emission reductions have increasingly been adopted by major companies all over the world and have increasingly been supported by regulatory bodies and public administrations. Despite this world-wide effort to achieve a better environmental performance through voluntary approaches, economic analysis has somehow neglected the importance of voluntary approaches as an environmental policy instrument. This book is a first attempt to fill this gap by gathering together all major experts in the fields and by providing a detailed analysis of all main aspects...

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...

A critical issue in dealing with climate change is deciding who has a right to emit carbon dioxide. Allocation in the European Emissions Trading Scheme provided the first in-depth description and analysis of the process by which rights to emit carbon dioxide were created and distributed in the European Union. This was the world's first large-scale experiment with an emission trading system for carbon dioxide and was likely to be copied by others if there was to be a global regime for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The book comprises contributions from those responsible for putting the...

The possible introduction of a carbon tax in Europe is an issue which has attracted the attention of numerous economists and policy-makers. The problems under debate concern the effects of the tax at different levels: what costs, in terms of GDP growth, will be paid by each European country?

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...

The European Union faces several interlinked challenges: how to protect the environment and favour sustainability; how to reduce unemployment and foster competitiveness in a context of growing globalization; how to reduce regional disparities among and within me mb er countries. The recent policy debate has clarified that the above objectives are not a trade off if jointly tackled. In particular, win-win policy options are available to the European Union by an appropriate integration of regulation, macro policy, social policy, fiscal policy and environmental policy. Evidence shows that...

This book collects some recent works on the application of dynamic game and control theory to the analysis of environmental problems. This collec- tion of papers is not the outcome of a conference or of a workshop. It is rather the result of a careful screening from among a number of contribu- tions that we have solicited across the world. In particular, we have been able to attract the work of some of the most prominent scholars in the field of dynamic analyses of the environment. Engineers, mathematicians and economists provide their views and analytical tools to better interpret the...

Giovanni Castellani Rector of the University of Venice This book contains the Proceedings of the Conference on "Economic Policy and Control Theory" which was held at the University of Venice (Italy) on 27 January-l February 1985. The goal of the Conference was to survey the main developments of control theory in economics, by emphasizing particularly new achievements in the analysis of dynamic economic models by con trol methods. The development of control theory is strictly related to the development of science and technology in the last forty years. Control theory was indeed applied mainly...