Environmental economics has traditionally been conducted in a closed economy mode. Most textbooks on the subject still reflect this restriction; international aspects of environmental problems are often not covered at all or dealt with as an afterthought. In a world in which many environmental pollutants spill over national borders, and national economies have become increasingly integrated, this state of affairs is clearly unsatisfactory: rational environmental policies undertaken in a globalizing world need to take the international economic and environmental relationships into consideration.

This perception has given rise to much literature employing an open economy approach to analysing environmental problems and policies. After a decade of intensive research, the time has come to take stock of the state-of-the-art knowledge. It is the objective of this volume to provide a review which will be of interest to scholars and graduate students of economics and political science who wish to familiarize themselves with the main issues and actors in the field of international environmental economics. This collection of non-technical, issue-oriented, and comprehensive surveys is written by leading specialists in international and environmental economics.