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This research develops a difference-in-differences (DID) model to explore the relationship between environmental policy (The Measures for the Administration of Permits for the Discharge of Key Water Pollutants in the Huaihe and Taihu River Basins, MAPD) and the performance of firms involved in the paper and paper products industry (MPP) in China. Cost and innovation are introduced as mediators to explore the mediating effects. A firm-level dataset from 1998 to 2007 is adopted for empirical study. The findings support the positive role of the MAPD, and the average treatment effect is 0.016.The heterogeneity analysis shows that the MAPD exerts a positive impact on non-state-owned and small-scale enterprises, with coefficients of 0.018 and 0.021, respectively. Moreover, MAPD increases enterprise costs harming firm performance. On the other hand, it can promote firm performance by improving innovation ability.

Recent years have seen increasing demand for wider application of strategic environmental assessment (SEA), especially SEA of major policies, as a powerful instrument to safeguard the environment during the rapid industrialization and urbanization in China. Debates on SEA are concentrated on its feasibility and effective implementation in practice. This study applies Emergy analysis within the framework of social–economic–natural complex eco-system theory to overcome the limitations of methods used for assessing regional sustainability so far. This established model is tested in the case of Chinese paper industry to assess the sustainability of 5 policy scenarios. The results show that Emergy-based Indices (EbI) are more effective to measure the sustainability of industry complex ecosystem, thus EbI approach is very useful in SEAs on policy scenarios of a given complex ecosystem.

The merits of different types of regulatory tools in eliminating pollution and at the same time inducing innovation have long been an interest of researchers in both environmental economics and industrial organization. Although there is a substantial theoretical literature investigating the potential for various environmental policies to attain these dual goals, this is a challenging empirical problem because every industry has its own inherent characteristics that play an important role in determining the performance of different regulatory tools. The majority of the work to date focuses on pollution abatement while leaving pollution prevention understudied. In most of the literature firms are also assumed to be symmetric. Asymmetries among firms add another degree and level of complexity to their strategic interactions, and affect the performance of different regulatory tools. This paper investigates the performance of two alternative regulatory tools, an emissions performance standard and an emissions tax, in reducing pollution and inducing pollution prevention and abatement R&D in the US pulp and paper industry. We construct a model representing the industry in an asymmetric Cournot duopoly framework, calibrate the model to disaggregated industry data, and run scenarios to replicate the behavior of the firms in an imperfectly competitive output market. Our results suggest that pollution prevention R&D can respond quite differently than abatement R&D to different policy instruments. The results indicate that R&D spillovers among firms play crucial role in technology development and strategies of the firms. Our results also suggest that strategic interactions between firms in an imperfectly competitive industry can have significant impacts of the levels of both types of R&D.

本研究は, わが国の環境問題・政策の推移を客観的な数値データとして捉えることを目的としている. 具体的には日本の環境白書を基にしたEICネット環境年表を使用し, 年表の記載事項4, 845件を対象にキーワードとセンテンスに着目した分析を行なう. キーワード分析では環境政策の視点が如何に変化したか, センテンス分析ではキーワード分析だけではカバーできない政策の目的や様態の実態を明らかにする. なお, キーワードおよびセンテシスは統一ルールに基づいて独自に設定し判断を行なった. 政策の重点は衛生と公害分野から自然保護, 気候変動, 循環型社会へと移り変わっていることが示された. 政策自体年々増加していることと, その内容が多様化し複雑になっていることも示された.

This is the approach paper for the forthcoming evaluation of the Inter-American Development Group's environmental and social safeguards systems. The paper lays out the evaluation's objectives and scope, the evaluation questions and the methodology which OVE will apply to conduct the evaluation as part of its 2017-18 work program.

This paper assesses the degree to which the British Government's recent Environment White Paper has changed the country's energy and environmental policies. It is concluded that the process by which the White Paper was produced may be of greater long term significance than the document itself. There has recently been a considerable change in the rhetoric of environmental policy and environmental issues are now taken seriously across all Whitehall departments. However, potential conflicts between environmental objectives and energy issues, notably electricity privatisation, mean that it has been difficult for the Government to establish a proactive environmental policy. Consequently, many challenges remain to be faced during the 1990s.

In the policy-making process concerning energy and environmental issues, cooperation between government and firms is a means to create a more efficient energy and environmental policy. Intermediary organizations can play an important role in this policy-making process. Aim of this study is to get insight into the role of one specific intermediary organization: the industry association. In this paper, we focus on the Dutch paper and board industry. Important policy themes for this industry are waste water, waste, and energy efficiency. We distinguished four types of governmental policy instruments: top-down regulation, interactive regulation, negative economic instruments, and positive economic instruments. We analyzed the role of the industry association in the policy-making process for all of these four instruments. The results clearly show different (relative) roles of the industry association in different steps of the policy-making processes and for different types of instruments.

Innovations may have positive societal effects such as improved environmental performance, and they are often portrayed as solutions to environmental problems. However, the mechanisms through which innovations develop and the ways in which public incentives support improved environmental performance of innovations are complex. This paper uses empirical cases to examine how environmental policies, market factors and technological push affect process and product innovations in the Nordic pulp, paper and packaging industries. The results show that environmental improvements in technologies and products are simultaneously driven by all three of these factors. Environmental innovations are often developed in anticipation of future policy or as side-effects of existing policies. However, while environmental policy directly influences process innovations, its connection to product innovations is less clear. The study points towards the importance of gradually tightening and predictable environmental policies that are flexible enough to allow the exploration of new technological developments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

In recent years a broader utilization of environmental taxes has been included in the political agenda in many European States in an effort to overcome the limits of an environmental policy structurally based on command-and-control measures and also to provide the Treasury with the necessary means to cut other taxes with distortionary effects on the economy, such as income taxes with very high marginal rates or social security contributions, mainly those levied on unskilled or low-skilled workers. This kind of manoeuvre could provide a double benefit to the economy, that is known in the literature as the double dividend.1

This paper discusses and analyses the evolution of the Finnish pulp and paper industries and their water pollution control strategies. The Finnish pulp and paper mills are mainly located along water courses in inland areas. The earliest documents on water pollution date back to the early 1900s. In spite of the remarkably good record during recent decades in water pollution control, it can be found among significant strategic decisions in only very few cases.

The effect of investments on environmental variables has been discussed through the win–win rhetoric, specifically in micro-level analysis. On the macro-level the win–win rhetoric has been replaced by the arguments for and against the substitutability of natural and manufactured capital. Here these two concepts belonging to different levels of analysis are linked by looking at the environmental and economic effects of chosen investment strategies in a traditionally capital-intensive industry over time. The paper shows that, rather than generalise the existence of win–win situations or the substitutability of capital, these positions are determined by purely situational factors. As a result, in the assessment of substitutability, the specific operating context of the industry needs to be taken into account. This implies also that environmental policy needs to be designed to be adaptive and responsive to those situational factors to create beneficial outcomes for the economy and for the environment.

The author presents a methodology which is used first to model a product-manufacturing-and-distribution system, and then to predict the resulting changes in environmental impact from changes either in taxation or in costs of inputs. A case study of the paper sector in the eastern and central United States is developed, derived from the 1993 US Commodity Flow Survey. From an analysis of five scenarios, two central findings arise: (1) the model is found to be unresponsive to even large changes in transport taxation, so an environmental policy which considers both transportation and production aspects at the same time is favored, and (2) fluctuations in raw-material costs can have an influence on environmental impact as great as or greater than that of changes in taxation levels.

As part of the shift in emphasis in environmental policy from clean-up to avoidance, environmental policy instruments that specify preferred technological directions for an industry are increasingly being used. Take-back requirements and mandatory recycling are cases in point. These directly affect the mix of materials and the technologies used by an industry. These effects reverberate throughout the industry and influence market conditions for everyone both up- and downstream in the supplier/client chains. As these chains frequently cross international frontiers, environmental policy-making is becoming increasingly significant in influencing competitive structures and international trade patterns. Concerns are that policy-making may lock in inappropriate technologies and that the policy process may be manipulated for industrial or trading advantage. Using fibre recycling in the European pulp and paper sector as a case study, it is shown how these concerns are manifest and also that materials accounting and operational research techniques exist to mitigate them. It is concluded that there is a need to establish agreed environmental impact evaluation methodologies to provide guidance on the robustness of policy-making and a basis for consistent, predictable and defensible policy-making.

Internalizing environmental costs is a necessary condition for an effective environmental policy. Since the majority of socio-economic activities cannot be free of environmental impacts, the noninternalized (external) environmental costs impose a peculiar thievery of welfare. Charging environmental costs through environmental taxes and other economic instruments is a necessary condition for avoiding welfare thievery. In this context, the anti-tax approaches emerging within ecological economics are found to be misleading and directing away from an effective environmental policy. Environmental responsibility is a different issue from the charging of the environmental costs. Therefore, environmental taxes should not be considered as an induction to less environmental responsibility and, hence, to environmental degradation.

"The object of the present report was not to look more closely into the interfaces between the Rio conventions but to weigh the benefits of international cooperation based on conventions against other forms (e.g. bilateral development cooperation). The most important approach of bi- and multilateral development cooperation in the forest sector consists in national forest programs (NFPs), which are designed to achieve an integrated, interministerial course of action on sustainable forest management and forest protection in developing countries. Analysis of the NFPs has shown that the most important bottlenecks to their implementation must be sought in the inherent difficulties of integrated action. A forest convention could help to eliminate these bottlenecks, as is shown by the experiences made in connection with other convention processes, where slow progress is being made with integrated action." (excerpt)

That environmental problems such as groundwater contamination, global warming, and loss of biodiversity pose mounting political challenges is now widely admitted. The meager progress in reversing these trends calls into question the adequacy of policy instruments conventionally used to address them. Gillroy maintains that the environmental policy failure stems from its grounding in economic reasoning. An alternative paradigm of Kantian inspiration is his proposed remedy.

George A. Gonzalez has authored a lucid and well-written book with a sharp thesis. He challenges the conventional claim that environmental policy is “an oasis of democracy†by developing a series of case studies to demonstrate that “members of the nation's economic elite—corporate decision-makers and other individuals of substantial wealth—are the dominant influences in the formation and development of U.S. environmental policies†(p. ix). In constructing his theoretical argument, Gonzalez combines G. William Domhoff's method of power structure analysis with James Weinstein's and others' historical analysis of corporate liberalism.

In two provocative new books, Elizabeth DeSombre and Matthew Paterson attack two issues that call into question common assumptions about international environmental pol- itics (IEP). Paterson asks: Does our global environmental predicament reflect unfortunate, but essentially unrelated, secular trends or the influence of deeper, structural forces? DeSombre asks: Does resolution of environmental problems, whatever their sources, require broad support among many countries, or can solutions arise from unilateral action by a single powerful state? Paterson's answer involves a refreshing critique of the IEP literature that shows how traditional realist and liberal approaches systematically ignore the un- derlying causes of global environmental change. DeSombre provides a trenchant analysis of when, how, and why a country will attempt, and succeed at, internalization of its own domestic environmental regulations. Both books make significant contributions to the growing IEP literature, ex- tending it to important new areas of research.

Eating local foods can reduce your greenhouse gas footprint, but not by as much as swapping meat for veggies.

Accounting for emissions associated with the demolition of buildings can help reduce the environmental footprint of the structures.