This paper examines the relationship between per capita income and a wide range of environmental indicators using cross-country panel sets. The manner in which this has been done overcomes several of the weaknesses asscociated with the estimation of environmental Kuznets curves (EKCs). outlined by Stern et al. (1996). Results suggest that meaningful EKCs exist only for local air pollutants whilst indicators with a more global, or indirect, impact either increase monotonically with income or else have predicted turning points at high per capita income levels with large standard errors – unless they have been subjected to a multilateral policy initiative. Two other findings are also made: that concentration of local pollutants in urban areas peak at a lower per capita income level than total emissions per capita; and that transport-generated local air pollutants peak at a higher per capita income level than total emissions per capita. Given these findings, suggestions are made regarding the necessary future direction of environmental policy.

The potential existence of buyer power in U.K. food retailing has attracted the scrutiny of the U.K.'s anti-trust authorities, culminating in the second of two comprehensive regulatory inquiries in recent years. Such inquiries are authoritative but correspondingly time-consuming and costly. Moreover, detection of buyer power has been dogged by the paucity of reliable evidence of its existence. In this paper, we present a simple theoretical model of oligopsony which delivers quasireduced form retailer-producer pricing equations with which the null of perfect competition can be tested using readily available market data. Using a cointegrated vector autoregression, we find empirical results that show the null of perfect competition can be rejected in seven of the nine food products investigated. Though not conclusive on the existence of buyer power, the proposed test offers a means via which the behaviour of the retail-producer price spread is consistent with it. At the very least, it can corroborate the concerns of the anti-trust authorities as to whether buyer power is potentially one source of concern.

The Grilli and Yang commodity price index is one of the most widely used commodity price series in the applied economics literature. This note provides some practical advice on updating this data series by listing the base period index values, identifying relevant data sources, and describing a method for computing subindex weights. JEL codes: O13, F1.

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T his p a p fonrscs on the atmi to which pice changts ocnrm'ng at the fann-leud arc transmitted to the ntail s c c h A /.nice transmission elasticity is dm'vcd which is shown to depend on the degree of m a d power in the food indusQ and the nature of the fwd i n d w t q 5 procnn'ng technology. The o/fsctting role of the /muusing technology and market power in dttennining the extent of price transmission a n highlighted. A casestudy W t s values for the p"'m transmission elasticity for the US kf and poh sectm.