Tradeable Permits Policy Evaluation Design And Reform

This publication offers valuable lessons for applying tradeable permits and provides links between policy evaluation and policy making general.

This publication offers valuable lessons for applying tradeable permits and provides links between policy evaluation and policy making general.

This publication offers valuable lessons for applying tradeable permits and provides links between policy evaluation and policy making general.

There has been an increase in the use of tradeable permit systems as a cost-effective environmental policy measure in OECD countries in recent years. For example, several countries are now implementing carbon trading schemes in the light of the Kyoto Protocol, and an EU-wide system will come into force in 2005. This publication brings together reports presented at an OECD workshop, held in 2003, to discuss key issues in the evaluation of the environmental effectiveness and economic efficiency of such systems. Areas covered include: successful design features; their application in a variety of different contexts such as air pollution controls, the degradation of wetlands, agricultural pollution, water scarcity and fisheries depletion; and technical issues; as well as case studies from Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United States.

Permit trading is an environmental policy instrument that has received increasing levels of attention over recent years. Coming from the field of air quality management, with the European CO2 emissions trading system being the most prominent example, it enters new fields of application, such as land use policy and biodiversity protection, water quality and water quantity trading. This book gives an overview of these recent developments and discusses the possibilities and limits of permit trading in environmental policies. The advantages of permit trading are not only seen with respect to economic efficiency, which leads to achieving the environmental target at minimum cost, but also with respect to the instrument’s environmental effectiveness. By setting a cap for the overall emissions, a given environmental target can be met. This makes permit trading an interesting case for many environmental fields where safeguarding the environmental target plays a dominant role. Against this background, permit trading is discussed in environmental policy fields, where it has not been considered before, for example, land use management, biodiversity protection and water trading. Permit Trading in Different Applications analyses the properties of permit trading: its possibilities and limitations, its design options and its restrictions on a more general level. It demonstrates how lessons learnt in established policy fields like air quality management can be transferred to new and emerging fields of application. This collection will provide students and practitioners in environmental sciences and policy with valuable research into instrument choice and design with respect to permit trading.

Publisher description

First published in 1985, Emissions Trading was a comprehensive review of the first large-scale attempt to use economic incentives in environmental policy in the U.S. and of the empirical and theoretical research on which this approach is based. Since its publication it has consistently been one of the most widely cited works in the tradable permits literature. The second edition of this classic study of pollution reform considers how the use of transferable permits to control pollution has evolved, looks at how these programs have been implemented in the U.S. and internationally, and offers an objective evaluation of the resulting successes, failures, and lessons learned over the last twenty-five years.