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The high level of nitrogen emissions over the last decades and their adverse impact on the natural environment and human health are a pressing environmental issue. A nitrogen tax can be a cost-efficient and effective policy instrument to reduce nitrogen emissions. However, adverse effects on low- and middle-income households might lead to societal and political frictions that could end up in resistance. In this paper we investigate how a hypothetical nitrogen tax covering the specific external costs of nitrogen could be implemented and estimate its short-term distributional effects on household income groups in Germany. The findings show that the proposed tax would be regressive. However, if the tax rate is set equal to the true cost of nitrogen, the monetary impacts would overall be small, ranging from 1.15% of income for the first income quintile to 0.66% for the fifth. Complementary policy measures to lower the burden on low-income households, farmers and the energy sector could preempt social resistance against the tax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Emission offshoring does not account for emission reductions in advanced economies. • Most advanced economies onshore more carbon emissions than they offshore emissions. • The USA net offshores emissions while China net onshores emissions. • Per-capita income does not predict which country specializes in green products. International trade and emission offshoring can reduce a country's domestic carbon dioxide emissions, helping it to reach emission reduction targets set under the prevailing territorial climate policy frameworks. We ask what is the net contribution of trade to national production-based emissions. Existing metrics (consumption-based emissions and the technology-adjusted balance of emissions embodied in trade) do not answer this question. Based on global multi-regional input-output tables and the domestic technology assumption, we calculate net emission onshoring as the difference between the emissions embodied in gross exports (onshoring) and the emissions avoided by gross imports (offshoring) for 43 countries between 2000–2014. We find that the USA offshores emissions and China onshores emissions; the aggregate trade balance explains this result while the trade composition plays a negligible role in either country. In general there is no cross-country relationship between net offshoring and per-capita income, and neither one between trade specialization in emission-intensive products and per-capita income. The developed countries' absolute decoupling of economic growth and production-based emissions since 2000 is "genuine" in the sense that it reflects domestic economic developments and is not owed to emission offshoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quantitative growth and increased social prominence of financial institutions and markets can be usefully seen in terms of the constraints or 'discipline' they impose on other private and public decision makers. The role of finance in allocating real resources may be less important than its role in supporting the claims and authority of wealth-owners vis-a-vis other social actors. This article discusses the political economy of financialization in the United States, Europe and India. In the United States, the latter role is most visible in the pressure non-financial corporations face to increase payouts to shareholders. In Europe, the financial constraints on national governments are more salient. Tightening these constraints is openly acknowledged as the major benefit of financial integration, yet, on the other hand, the constraints financialization imposes on policy may also limit the extent to which finance can in fact be liberalized. This countervailing pressure is visible in the great expansion of central banks' balance sheets and management of financial markets over the past decade. It is even more clearly visible in India, where the conflict between financialization and concrete policy goals has sharply limited the extent of liberalization, despite consistent rhetorical support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]