Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Economics Research Institute Study Paper

Volume

95

Issue

11

Publisher

Utah State University Department of Economics

Publication Date

1995

Rights

Copyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact the Institutional Repository Librarian at digitalcommons@usu.edu.

First Page

1

Last Page

27

Abstract

In this paper we study some aspects of the question of international environmental regulation from a game theoretic perspective. We address two broad questions. First, we examine the circumstances under which the pursuit of unilateral environmental policy by a country in a Stackelberg game will make that country worse off Second, we study the effects of environmental regulation by means of alternate price control instruments in a Stackelberg game where there is transboundary pollution.

We find that there are plausible theoretical circumstances in which the pursuit of unilateral environmental policy is not a good idea. Further, we show that in choosing between alternate pollution control instruments, national governments typically face a tradeoff between instruments which correct more distortions but are costly to implement and instruments which correct fewer distortions but are less costly to implement. In particular, we obtain a dominance result for a tariff policy; this result favors the use of tariffs from an informational standpoint alone.

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