Export Bans, Environmental Protection, and Unemployment

This study investigates the case for an export ban on intermediate goods which generate environmental damage. Since export restrictions on intermediates have long been advocated as a method of stimulating domestic industries in developing countries, we consider whether the case for an export ban is strengthened or weakened by the presence of unemployment in the industrial sector. We find that, in the short run, an export restriction worsens unemployment, thus weakening the case for a ban. In the long run, however, the results are reversed. If the environmental problem is severe, unemployment has a negligible impact on the case for an export ban.     

Environmental Preservation, Sectoral Unemployment, and Trade in Resources

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to examine the optimal level of environmental preservation in terms of its costs and benefits for a closed as well as an open economy. The optimal preservation policy for a closed economy is to tax the general population and use the tax revenue to compensate affected workers. Furthermore, for a small open economy, free trade in resources can meet whatever shortage of domestic productive resources that may occur, thereby leading to a higher optimal level of environmental preservation.     

Environmental Protection and Urban Unemployment: Environmental Policy Reform in a Polluted Dualistic Economy

This paper explores sufficient conditions for the welfare‐improving environmental policy reform in the Harris–Todaro economy. A rise in the pollution tax rate in the urban manufacturing has spillover effects on the two labor market distortions: the less‐than‐optimal manufacturing employment and the urban unemployment. If both are weakened the welfare improves. Otherwise, we need to develop an alternative sufficient condition. It is shown that there exists a range of welfare‐improving pollution tax rates, and that it corresponds to the lower values of tax rate. This range may shrink by the wage subsidy policy and the technological change toward less pollution‐intensive techniques.     

Cooperative Management of Groundwater Resources in the Presence of Environmental Externalities

This paper investigates how cooperation among users can achieve a better management of groundwater in the presence of environmental externalities. Cooperation allows users to internalize the damages caused by their activities and reduce extractions. The paper develops a game theoretical framework to assess the value of cooperation in an aquifer that is divided into three sub-aquifers that are being overly exploited. Two types of externalities are modeled: first, water extractions in each sub-aquifer impact water levels in neighboring sub-aquifers (extraction externality). Second, the three sub-aquifers are also connected to an ecosystem and thus decisions in each sub-aquifer affect the health of the ecosystem (environmental externality). A cooperative game theory model is applied. The model empirically shows how the uncontrolled extractions in each sub-aquifer affects neighboring groundwater users but also cause severe impacts to the linked ecosystem. The model is tested empirically in one of the most important aquifers in Spain, the Eastern la Mancha aquifer. The results illustrate how both extraction and environmental externalities interact in affecting the likelihood of cooperation among the users. The paper estimates the value of cooperation and its stability with and without the environmental externality.     

International Capital Mobility in the Presence of Unemployment Insurance

The paper develops a general–equilibrium model with layoff unemployment to examine the effect of different unemployment insurance policies on international capital mobility. Conditions are derived under which capital will flow to the high–benefit country. Incentives for international capital movements are unaffected by how the burden of financing unemployment benefits is distributed between workers and firms. It is shown that capital outflows might have positive welfare effects for workers. This contrasts with results from standard models of international factor movements.     

Optimal Factor Income Taxation in the Presence of Unemployment

According to conventional wisdom internationally mobile capital should not be taxed or should be taxed at a lower rate than labour. An important underlying assumption behind this view is that there are no market imperfections, in particular that labour markets clear competitively. At least for Europe, which has been suffering from high unemployment for a long time, this assumption does not seem appropriate. This paper studies the optimal factor taxation in the presence of unemployment which results from the union-firm wage bargaining both with optimal and restricted profit taxation when capital is internationally mobile and labour immobile. In setting tax rates the government is assumed to behave as a Stackelberg leader towards the private sector playing a Nash game. The main conclusion is that in the presence of unemployment, the conventional wisdom turns on its head; capital should generally be taxed at a higher rate than labour.     

全球化背景下中国的资源和环境保护——从美日欧诉中国限制稀土出口案谈起

经济的全球化使得环境问题也逐渐成为了国际性的问题.为了实现本国贸易和环境保护的双赢,很多国家纷纷采取各种措施来维护本国利益,甚至利用本国在经济全球化中的优势地位影响和迫使他国改变环境资源政策.以美日欧诉中国限制稀土出口案为范例,可以有助于看清我国在全球化背景下资源和环境保护所面临的挑战和机遇,并促成我国提出科学有效的应对措施.     

Trade, Wages and Unemployment in the Presence of Hiring and Firing Costs

This paper offers a new explanation of the recent Australian wage inequality and unemployment experience. Building on a standard international trade model, it is argued that trade affects wage inequality and unemployment through changes in the bargaining power of different groups of workers in the presence of hiring and firing costs. This allows previously puzzling aspects of the trends to be explained, including the inconsistency of the existing Stolper-Samuelson trade explanation with rising relative skilled wages at the same time as rising skilled labour intensity of production. Considering differences in labour market institutions, in particular hiring and firing costs and minimum wages, allows differences between the experiences of Australia, the USA and Europe to be explained.     

Unemployment and International Factor Movement in the Presence of Skilled and Unskilled Labor

Widespread unemployment has been observed in some developing countries. On the other hand, extensive movement of labor across countries has also been observed. Therefore, in order to examine the interaction between the domestic and international labor markets, this paper develops a model that includes unemployment, international factor movement, and the difference between skilled and unskilled labor. The model examines the effect of production subsidies on unemployment and evaluates their effectiveness as a possible policy in order to alleviate the problem of unemployment. Further, this paper investigates the effects of international factor movement on unemployment and welfare.     

建立我国农业资源环境保护体系探析

农业资源环境是农业持续发展的基础条件和根本保障。依靠国家的宏观调控力量以及强化农业生产经营者的自我意识,坚农业资源环境进行有效的保护,发展现代生态农业,是市场经济条件下我国农业发展方向的基本选择。     

民族地区煤炭资源开发与环境保护可持续发展研究——以内蒙古为例

内蒙古作为拥有丰富煤炭资源的民族地区的一员,随着煤炭资源的大规模开发,自2002年以来连续8年居中国经济增长速度的第一位。但在带来经济快速增长的同时,也存在着煤炭资源种类结构和地区结构不合理、水资源匮乏、资源利用程度不高等资源可持续发展问题和生态破坏、固体废弃物污染、空气污染等环境问题,需要采取必要措施,加大资源整合力度,提高资源综合利用水平,逐步实现资源可持续发展;加大环境污染治理投资力度,加快技术创新和技术引进,强化清洁生产,强化节能减排,增加碳汇容量,逐步实现环境可持续发展;以制度创新规避"资源诅咒"。     

Unemployment,Wage Inequality and International Factor Movement in the Presence of Agricultural Dualism

This paper investigates how the international factor movements affect the unemployment and skilled–unskilled wage inequality with the existence of a modern agricultural sector. Our research has the new feature that we not only consider that the rural labor migrates to the urban sector but also to the modern agricultural sector. The main conclusions are that the unskilled labor outflow certainly decreases the wage inequality and unemployment rate and the influences that skilled labor movement and capital inflow have on wage inequality and unemployment rate are dependent on the factor intensity between the urban and modern agricultural sectors.     

对自然资源开发与生态环境保护关系的基本辨析

自然资源开发与生态环境保护贯穿于经济社会发展的全过程。从客观认识资源开发与生态环境的基本关系入手,提出了关于开发与保护的若干建议,为我国自然资源管理制度改革提供有益借鉴。     

Optimal Environmental Management in the Presence of Irreversibilities

We consider an environment of a fixed size that can be converted to another use. This conversion can be made in steps, but it is irreversible. The future benefits (per unit) from the original use, and from the alternative use, follow a diffusion process. For a fairly general case, we show that the value function must be the unique (viscosity) solution to the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. We also exhibit several properties of the solution for the case of constant relative risk aversion between 0 and 1, and a log-linear diffusion for the benefits. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C61, D90, Q30.     

Consequences of Environmental Tax Reform for Unemployment and Welfare

We investigate the welfare effects of environmental tax reform, i.e. raising environmental taxes and using the proceeds to reduce distortionary taxes on labour. The framework of analysis is a small open economy with involuntary unemployment due to a rigid consumer wage. Environmental tax reform boosts not only environmental quality but also employment if substitution between labour and resources is easy, the production share of the fixed factor is large, and the initial tax rates on resources and profits are small. If the initial tax system is sub-optimal with a negligible tax on resources, profits rise as well.     

Environmental Abatement and the Macroeconomy in the Presence of Ecological Thresholds

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria featuring reversible hysteresis. The isocline for the stock of pollution possesses two stable branches. Assuming that the ecology is initially located on the upper (high pollution) branch of the isocline, a simple time-invariant temporary abatement policy can be used to steer the environment from the high- to the low-pollution equilibrium. In all models considered in this paper, a “cold turkey” abatement policy is optimal within the class of stepwise policies, i.e. the largest feasible shock should be administered for the shortest possible amount of time. The cold-turkey result is robust to alternative models for the economic system, although there is a capital feedback effect that either helps or hinders the speed of transition to the low-pollution equilibrium.     

Environmental Policy in the Presence of Induced Technological Change

We examine the hypothesis that induced technological change (ITC) can dramatically lower the cost of a carbon tax in a static optimal tax model. The research and development sector is represented by an aggregate stock of energy-saving technology, which acts as a weak substitute with a polluting resource in the energy generation sector. Using this model, we analytically show how ITC occurs and affects the cost of a carbon tax. Applying quantitative estimates of the size of ITC to numerical simulations calibrated to the US economy, we find that existing empirical evidence can reduce the welfare cost of environmental tax reform by 12%. Our tests of alternative parameters show that this result is highly sensitive to the assumptions used, suggesting that ITC could result in much larger reductions in cost.     

Co-operation and Unilateral Commitment in the Presence of Global Environmental Problems

This paper focuses on the link between group co-operation and unilateral commitment of some countries in the presence of global environmental problems. We show that in case of a failure of negotiation, some countries can decide to commit unilaterally and reduce their emissions. We call this behaviour precautionary commitment. Absence of international agreement does not mean global defection from the environmental issue.We also show that the emergence of a non-co-ordinatedglobal co-operation can result from a strategic actionfrom the members of the coalition. The insiders of the coalition create an incentive for the non-members to reduce without co-ordinating their emissions.     

The Optimal Environmental Tax and Urban Unemployment in an Open Economy

This paper investigates how a rise in the urban pollution tax rate may affect urban unemployment and welfare in a small open Harris–Todaro (HT) model with intersectoral capital mobility. First, by formulating urban pollution as a dirty input in manufacturing, we find that an increase in the urban pollution tax rate can increase the level of urban unemployment even with intersectoral capital mobility. That is, the optimistic finding by Rapanos (2007 ) that environmental protection policy reduces urban unemployment in the long run does not always hold. Second, the (sub)optimal pollution tax rate under urban unemployment is higher than the Pigouvian tax rate (the marginal damage of pollution). This result opposes those of Beladi and Chao (2006 ) for a closed HT economy and that of Tsakiris et al. (2008 ) for an open HT economy with sector‐specific capital.