Like their counterparts in industrialized countries, environmental regulators in developing countries rely principally on two types of instruments: command-and-control (CAC) policies, such as emissions and technology standards, and to a lesser extent, market-based instruments (MBIs), such as emissions fees and tradable permits. But these regulators often lack the capacity to implement, monitor, and enforce CAC and MBI policies. As a result, the efficacy of those policies is an empirical matter. We review emerging experimental and quasi-experimental evidence on CAC and MBI policies in developing countries, specifically, from 32 studies of CAC policies and 8 studies of MBIs. Although drawn from a small and decidedly nonrandom sample of countries and policy types, the evidence clearly indicates that CAC and MBI policies can have significant environmental benefits in developing countries. In addition to cataloging and reviewing this evidence, we discuss data and methodological challenges to augmenting it and suggest directions for future research.
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 U.S. 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.
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