Environmental Policy

Description

In this lecture, we describe various environmental problems that we face in the contemporary society, provide economic analyses toward social issues associated with these problems, look into the decision making process in the national and local governments in Japan, and explain policies to encounter them.
First we describe environmental problems in general and that of pollution, waste disposals and global warming. In particular, we deal with the Kyoto Protocol whose commitment period of reducing greenhouse gases has begun this year from the political and administrative perspective.
We then examine their implications to the necessity of creating a recycling society, and relationship between global warming, economic development and population explosion. We then turn to economic analyses of these problems: problems of static resource allocations such as externality and public goods and problems of dynamic resource allocations such as depletable and renewable resources, while comparing those theories with what really happened in some historical environmental problems. We discuss various policy tools that resolve these problems, e.g., regulations, Pigovian tax and subsidy, tradable permits, deposit system, as well as their implications to informational asymmetry and international trade. In particular, emission trading system which began with the Kyoto Protocol will be discussed. A short discussion of cost-benefit analysis for environmental protection and diplomacy for post-Kyoto is also planned.

Course materials

 

Evaluation