Resources

A few years ago, a group of young social scientists decided to team up to study the opportunities for least developed countries (LDCs) to produce biofuels.

A British non-profit organization has made a series of broad recommendations for how the EU budget could be better directed towards addressing climate change. Investing in our future: a European budget for climate security, published by Green Alliance, calls on Europe to take the lead in shaping the response to climate change, and to take a closer look at the linkages between environmental and economic policy.

A paper from the a nonprofit consumer organization, Food & Water Watch, warns that government support for open ocean fish farms is environmentally and economically unsustainable. The report, Fishy Farms: The Problems with Open Ocean Aquaculture, reacts to moves by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to promote open ocean aquaculture as a way to reduce the United States' seafood trade deficit and ease pressures on decimated wild marine fish populations.

A briefing paper comments on a recently introduced fertilizer subsidy in Malawi.

In November the International Institute for Sustainable Development's Global Subsidies Initiative released a report that analyzes government subsidies intended to influence the location of investments.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on federal subsidies to electricity, estimating funding for electricity related research and development (R&D), tax expenditures for subsidizing electricity production, as well as other government support for electricity.   The GAO finds that subsidies and tax expenditures have increased over the 2002-07 period examined.

Farmsubsidy.org recently published the first issue of its quarterly newsletter focused on farm subsidies under the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finds that government support to farmers dropped in 2006; although the decrease was due mainly to rising prices for agricultural commodities rather than changes to government policies.

A new working paper by Statistics Norway suggests that governments should not provide subsidies for the introduction of hydrogen cars.

An expert group convened to analyze groundwater management and ownership in India has criticized subsidy programs for contributing to rapidly falling water tables in many areas of the country.   Landholders in India are free to extract water that runs below their property.