Empirical Studies of Environmental Policies in Europe

The visible encroachment of industrial development on the environment, and its unintended consequences, has increased public demand for better environmental management and policy. As policy makers struggle to meet these demands, empirical analysis of the effects of environmental policies is crucial for guiding the development, implementation and evaluation of alternative government interventions and regulatory approaches. Such analysis is scarce, however. The need for empirical studies is particularly large in Europe, where environmental policy debates are still mainly theoretical and tend to reflect different ideological positions more than informed assessments of alternative policies. This study presents contributions on empirical environmental policy evaluation. The individual chapters, written by authors from Europe and the US, contain quantitative studies of proposed and implemented environmental policies, at both the micro- and macroeconomic levels.The policy issues studied in this volume include the "double dividend-hypothesis" of carbon taxation, the political economy of environmental policy development, the voluntary environmental efforts of corporations, the enforcement of environmental regulations, the development of environmental policies in transition economies and the implementation of environmental policies in the face of transboundary pollution.