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Is there a case to be made for preferential treatment of the exposed sector in an economy when compliance to an aggregate emissions constraint induced by an international environmental agreement is mandatory? This question is being debated in many countries, including The Netherlands, in the context of the implementation of the kyoto protocol. We address this issue in a general equilibrium framework in this paper, and theoretically cover several market structures, including perfect competition, oligopoly and large country case. Our main finding is that in many circumstances preferential treatment is not warranted from the point of view of maximizing social welfare.

This paper addresses the existence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve for China, using a sample of thirty regions, covering the period 1982–1997. The types of pollution included are wastewater, waste gas and solid waste. We consider the development of the sources of pollution in a pooled cross-section analysis with pollution in absolute levels, in per capita terms and relative to real Gross Regional Product (GRP). At intermediate levels of GRP per capita, the increase of solid and gas emissions tends to decelerate, but accelerates again at high levels of GRP per capita. Water pollution decreases with per capita GRP. We also predict future waste gas emissions.

Mostly infinite dimensional economies can be considered limits of finite dimensional economies, in particular when we think of time or product differentiation. We investigate conditions under which sequences of quasi-equilibria in finite dimensional economies converge to a quasi-equilibrium in the infinite dimensional economy. It is shown that convergence indeed occurs if the usual continuity assumption concerning the preference relations for finite dimensional commodity spaces is slightly modified.