Alessio D'Amato

Waste Sustainability, Environmental Management and Mafia: Analysing Geographical and Economic Dimensions

Waste management / disposal performances and a desirable delinking between income and waste trends are influenced by socio economic, institutional and policy factors. In highly regionalised settings many idiosyncratic factors of local interest influence waste management and disposal. Through an impact on policy enforcement costs, crime activities in a defined area and their geographical spillovers, may negatively affect legal forms of waste management and disposal. Given its high regional heterogeneity and known plague of Mafia in areas affected by recent =waste crisis‘, Italy is a compelling case study: in full consistence to a theoretical model that analyzes how legal disposal (landfill), illegal disposal and recyclable waste levels are influenced by waste tariff and crime; econometric analysis on Italian provinces, shows that separated collection and legal forms of waste disposal are lower when crime spills are present. Crime activities erode and slow down the enhancement of waste management and disposal brought about by socio economic and structural factors enhanced by the introduction of newly crafted economic minded tariffs.

Analysing the interactions of energy and climate policies in a broad policy ‘optimality’ framework: the Italian case study

The paper investigates the effectiveness and efficiency of energy-environmental policy interactions in Italy, adopting a broad optimality perspective that includes policy feasibility and dynamic efficiency. The analysis highlights that though some complementarity among different policies exists, climate policies have been often undermined by energy and renewables policy. Nevertheless, some complementarities among policy landscapes are found, as in the case of the Kyoto Fund (climate policy) and of the incentives and funding towards thermal energy, both acting as a complementary tool to cover non-EU-ETS sectors. Overall, renewables oriented policies bring about efficacy, but this often occurs at the expenses of their efficiency, thus generating a trade-off between these two components of optimality. Finally, incentives for renewables and energy efficiency investments give a mixed signal to improve innovation and to stimulate the green sector. In conclusion, notwithstanding efficacy is present in some cases, cost effectiveness and efficiency are far from being achieved.

Multi pollutant yardstick schemes as environmental policy tools

We consider environmental regulation of n risk-averse, multiple pollutant firms. We develop a yardstick competition scheme where the regulatory scheme depends on the difference between a firms aggregate performance and the average aggregate performance of the industry. Whether this instrument dominates Pigouvian taxation depends on the complete structure of the covariance matrix of the common random terms in measured pollution. Moreover, if the number of firms is large enough, the yardstick scheme is always superior to Pigouvian taxation. This analysis also provides new arguments in favor of strict liability rather than negligence liability as a regulatory tool.

A Carbon Tax Credit Policy in the Presence of Technological Spillovers

We model an environmental policy problem with two representative firms in two countries (one for each country). Firms are subject to environmental taxation, aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, and a unilateral technological spillover takes place: one of the two countries (innovating country) is responsible for generating the technological spillover while the other country is the one benefiting from the spillover e¤ect. Two different scenarios are analysed: one where countries do not cooperate and one where a single supranational authority is in charge of setting environmental policy. At first, both countries feature emissions taxation aimed at reducing CO2 emissions. In such a case, we show that the standard international externality applies, i.e. a suboptimal emission tax rate is set, leading to larger than efficient pollution. However, the tax rate is larger than marginal national damages in the innovating country due to the need to provide incentives towards technical change. Then we present a setting where the two countries are both subject to a national tax on emissions but the innovating country introduces a tax credit which is directly proportional to the innovative effort. In such a setting, we obtain counterintuitive results: interestingly, for a sufficiently large spillover, the tax rate in the non cooperative setting might exceed the one arising under cooperation.