{"title":"Input taxes in agriculture: Experiences and perspectives for European agriculture","authors":"Robert Finger , Anders Branth Pedersen","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108575","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108575","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Taxes on agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides are often discussed, but there are large knowledge gaps as existing evidence on the functioning, experiences and limitations is outdated and scattered. We fill this gap by synthesizing knowledge on agricultural input taxes and focusing on their potential for European policy. We show that there is great potential for input taxes to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of agri-environmental policies. If properly designed, (i) taxes can provide targeted incentives to achieve environmental objectives in a cost-effective way, (ii) a redistribution of tax revenues to farmers can limit income effects, (iii) when taxes replace command and control measures, this can contribute to administrative simplification. However, the experience with input taxes in Europe is mixed. Input taxes have often failed to achieve their intended effects, e.g. because of poor tax design and low tax levels, and there are other limitations that generate strong resistance in policy debates. We identify ways to overcome these limitations and present lessons from positive examples, such as the Danish experience. We argue that agricultural policy needs more than input taxes, but that they should be part of a comprehensive mix of instruments within an agricultural and food policy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"233 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143577324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contextual behavioral informed nudges to stimulate waste prevention and recycling. A framework and a research agenda","authors":"Amedeo Argentiero , Massimo Cesareo , Vincenzo Fasone , Giulio Pedrini , Giovambattista Presti","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108576","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108576","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Waste prevention and recycling have gained a focal position in the research agendas of scholars and policy makers. By drawing links between economics and psychology, Behavioral Economics (BE) offers a useful framework to stimulate benign individual decisions and choices in this field, by stressing the role of human factors in shaping them. Two distinct approaches can be identified, differing in how they conceptualize the putative independent variables that govern human behavior: 1) cognitive models and 2) behavioral-oriented models. The extant experimental literature, however, has not satisfactorily developed this twofold perspective in the analysis of possible nudging strategies to encourage waste prevention and recycling. Building on this research gap, the paper highlights the limitations of the current cognitive-based framework and explores the potential for extending the application of a contextual behavioral approach within this field of study. We propose a research agenda centered on integrating contextual behavioral tools into nudging interventions, identifying two main benefits arising from such an innovative approach: (i) a wider adoption of value-based actions, (ii) a mitigation of the decay of the nudging effect in the long term. These “contextual behavioral informed nudges” could be especially effective in situations involving a trade-off between health and environmental protection.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 108576"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143577947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Giuseppe Attanasi , Barbara Buljat Raymond , Agnès Festré , Andrea Guido
{"title":"Raising environmental awareness with augmented reality","authors":"Giuseppe Attanasi , Barbara Buljat Raymond , Agnès Festré , Andrea Guido","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108563","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108563","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Individuals are often poorly informed about the environmental consequences of their actions. Informational campaigns are a widely used policy tool to address imperfect information. However, previous research suggests that simply providing information may be ineffective and fail to engage individuals. We investigate whether augmented reality (AR) can reduce psychological distance and promote pro-environmental behavior. In two incentivized experiments (laboratory and contextualized), we evaluate the effect of AR visualizations of marine plastic-pollution consequences on participants’ psychological distance and donations to pro-environmental organizations. These measures are complemented by self-reported environmental concern, pro-environmental engagement, intention to act, and prior experience with AR technology. Our results show no significant impact of AR visualizations on psychological distance or donation levels in either the AR-Lab or AR-Context settings. Consistent with these behavioral findings, we observe no significant differences across experimental conditions in self-reported measures. Interestingly, we document a general optimism regarding the effectiveness of immersive technologies as policy tools, highlighting a potential misalignment between public expectations and the actual effectiveness of these technologies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 108563"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143562759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Assessing pathways for pursuing coherence between local implementation of emerging alternative economic approaches and international investment law","authors":"Ted Gleason","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108566","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108566","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>International investment law has potential unintended consequences on emerging local experiments in economic governance aiming to decouple economic growth from the use of natural resources and environmental degradation. While local regulatory measures may appear detached from international legal obligations, conduct of territorial governmental entities can be attributed to States on the same basis as central governments. Consequently, local measures which stray from 20th century economic paradigms and negatively impact projects protected under an operative international investment agreement may lead to international legal responsibility. This article seeks to answer the question of whether international investment law creates barriers to local implementation of alternative economic approaches. It finds that such barriers exist and explores avenues for overcoming such obstacles in the near-term. The article also finds that local actors must pay attention to multi-layered considerations beyond the local context as regulatory measures implementing postgrowth or degrowth approaches are not isolated from other levels of governance. It also highlights pathways for ensuring local regulatory autonomy. It concludes that while conflict between international investment law and local alternative economic approaches will persist in the near future, immediately available albeit imperfect pathways to mitigate the risk of international responsibility for local regulatory measures are available.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 108566"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143552445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond the EKC: Economic development and environmental degradation in the US","authors":"Mihai Mutascu","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108567","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108567","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper explores the impact of economic development on environmental degradation in the United States of America (US) using a Wavelet Quantile Correlation (WQC) methodology proposed by <span><span>Kumar and Padakandla (2022)</span></span>. The span covers the period 1992M1-2022M12.</div><div>The analysis does not confirm the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis in the US, offering short-term and long-term perspectives of the ‘economic development - environmental degradation’ nexus as a novelty.</div><div>The core findings show a strong link between economic development and environmental degradation in the US, with short-term patterns exhibiting a negative sign in inverted-S and S shapes. Long-term patterns, however, display a positive sign in S and inverted-S shapes.</div><div>These results remain robust across different gas types but with a time-delay effects due to molecular differences and their respective impacts on climate and environmental health.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 108567"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143552444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Valeria Fanghella , Lisette Ibanez , John Thøgersen
{"title":"What you don't know, can't hurt you: Avoiding donation requests for environmental causes","authors":"Valeria Fanghella , Lisette Ibanez , John Thøgersen","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108578","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108578","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent research suggests that people are willing to pay to avoid requests for prosocial behavior. However, it is unknown whether this applies to private pro-environmental requests. To study this, we conducted a pre-registered, incentivized online experiment where participants played two consecutive dictator games with an environmental charity of their choice. In stage 1, we varied the type of dictator game and the information provided in a 2 × 2 factorial between-subject design: (i) a standard dictator game versus one with a costly opt-out option; (ii) with or without social information about the average donation made by participants in a previous session. All participants played a standard dictator game in stage 2, the primary aim of which was to capture temporal spillovers from stage 1. Overall, 9 % of participants opted out, leading to lower donations in the dictator game with the costly opt-out option. Providing social information decreases donations in the standard dictator game and appears to increase opt-outs when the costly opt-out option is available, but not statistically significant. Distinct spillover effects emerged depending on the options available and decisions made in stage 1, indicating that the context and motivation of the initial behavior affect the direction of the temporal spillover.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 108578"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143562760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Critical realism, methodological pluralism, and ecological economics","authors":"Richard B. Norgaard","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108581","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108581","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Critical realism is an especially inappropriate philosophical basis for ecological economics since it has developed entirely within the social sciences, relies on transcendentalism as a way of understanding reality, and ignores natural realities and the role of technology. The philosophy of methodological pluralism continues to inform and represent ecological economics well.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"233 ","pages":"Article 108581"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143562839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kelly Gingrich , Lina Brand-Correa , Elaine Howarth , Anna Stratton
{"title":"Degrowth in a settler state: climate-just economic transitions and Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in Canada","authors":"Kelly Gingrich , Lina Brand-Correa , Elaine Howarth , Anna Stratton","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108549","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108549","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Degrowth offers pathways to stay within ecological limits while increasing human and planetary wellbeing. As non-indigenous scholars living in the settler state of Canada we see a gap in the degrowth literature regarding degrowth transitions within settler societies, as much of it comes out of a European context. In this paper, we analyze three political commitments that Canada has signed - the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), the Paris Climate Agreement and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,- to explore how a degrowth transition may help us move forward together on the path of Reconciliation with (and decolonization of) First Nations, Metis and Inuit Peoples (Indigenous Peoples). We do this by searching for interconnections between Canada's current obligations towards Reconciliation and three pillars of degrowth thought: ecological limits and Reconciliation with the land; autonomy and Indigenous sovereignty; and alternative views of ‘the good life’. We offer an exploration of these interconnections to open up ways to ground degrowth transitions in reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Our aim is to encourage and challenge the ecological economics and degrowth communities to engage with pluralistic and decolonial imaginaries in settler societies specifically.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 108549"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143552446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decoupling pessimism and the dilemma of growth. A reply to Jackson et al. (2024)","authors":"Rikard H. Warlenius","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108580","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108580","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Are most degrowth/postgrowth advocates “decoupling pessimists”, in the sense that they are critical about the possibilities to decouple carbon emissions from economic growth quickly and sufficiently? So I have claimed, but to my surprise, Tim Jackson, Jason Hickel, and Giorgos Kallis (2024) denounce that they are and instead claim that “most postgrowth scholars readily accept the need for high levels of decoupling”. Despite what is stated in <span><span>Hickel and Kallis (2020)</span></span> and how the article has been interpreted, they now further claim that there are no “definable limits to decoupling”.</div><div>In this reply to Jackson, Hickel and Kallis commentary, the foundation for why they were interpreted as decoupling pessimists is laid out, while their new and more optimist standpoint is welcomed. Further, my view on “the dilemma of growth” and how it differs from Jackson, Hickel and Kallis is elaborated. The difference revolves around the question of capitalism: can it be expected to stop growing, and is it likely to disappear within short? If the answer to both questions is no, strong decoupling is our best chance to avoid runaway climate change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 108580"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143552443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do economists think about climate change and inequality? Semantic analysis and topic modeling of top five economics journals","authors":"Hassan El Tinay, Juliet B. Schor","doi":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108548","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108548","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While there has been a call for economics to engage with the challenges of climate change, many have voiced concerns that the discipline has failed to seriously deal with the relationship between climate change and inequality. In this paper, we use computational methods – including bibliometric analysis, semantic analysis, and topic modeling – to identify a) the extent to which the core of the discipline of economics has dealt with the question of climate change and b) how engagement with climate change has been framed, especially with respect to varying forms of inequality – intergenerational, domestic, and global. As a proxy for the core of mainstream economic thought, we work with publications from the top five economic journals – <em>American Economic Review</em> (AER), <em>Econometrica</em> (ECMA), <em>The Journal of Political Economy</em> (JPE), T<em>he Quarterly Journal of Economics</em> (QJE), and <em>The Review of Economic Studies</em> (ReStud) – from 1975 to 2023. We find that over this period, these journals have cumulatively only published 25 unique research articles on the topic of climate change, and we also find that those publications reflected a lack of engagement with the role and consequences of domestic and global inequality in dynamics of climate change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51021,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Economics","volume":"232 ","pages":"Article 108548"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143519812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}