This paper explores sufficient conditions for the welfare-improving environmental policy reform in the Harris-Todaro economy. A rise in the pollution tax rate in the urban manufacturing has spillover effects on the two labor market distortions: the less-than-optimal manufacturing employment and the urban unemployment. If both are weakened the welfare improves. Otherwise, we need to develop an alternative sufficient condition. It is shown that there exists a range of welfare-improving pollution tax rates, and that it corresponds to the lower values of tax rate. This range may shrink by the wage subsidy policy and the technological change toward less pollution-intensive techniques.

The author investigates the conditions under which environmental protection and trade liberalization might improve urban unemployment and welfare in a small open Harris-Todaro model with polluting urban manufacturing. While a tariff reduction decreases manufacturing employment, a rise in the pollution tax rate may increase it when a dirty input is complementary to capital. Environmental protection and trade liberalization are consistent in reducing the level of urban unemployment because they lower it under the same condition. They are consistent in increasing GDP if a rise in the pollution tax rate decreases manufacturing employment. Otherwise, trade liberalization will mitigate a decrease in GDP because of environmental protection if the degree of urbanization is low and if rural technology exhibits weak diminishing returns to labor. This GDP effect plays a central role in welfare improvement. Copyright � 2008 The Author. Journal compilation � 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This paper investigates how a rise in the urban pollution tax rate may affect urban unemployment and welfare in a small open Harris-Todaro (HT) model with intersectoral capital mobility. First, by formulating urban pollution as a dirty input in manufacturing, we find that an increase in the urban pollution tax rate can increase the level of urban unemployment even with intersectoral capital mobility. That is, the optimistic finding by Rapanos (2007) that environmental protection policy reduces urban unemployment in the long run does not always hold. Second, the (sub)optimal pollution tax rate under urban unemployment is higher than the Pigouvian tax rate (the marginal damage of pollution). This result opposes those of Beladi and Chao (2006) for a closed HT economy and that of Tsakiris et al. (2008) for an open HT economy with sector-specific capital.

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We derive the optimal subsidy policy for an interconnection agreement between two symmetric Internet service providers (ISPs) competing á la Cournot in a network service market. The interconnection quality agreed upon is lower than the socially optimal level, as suggested by Crémer et al. (2000). In the basic model where both ISPs compete in the domestic market, the optimal investment subsidy rate depends positively on the strength of network externalities. In the extended model where home and foreign ISPs compete in the home market, the optimal subsidy rate for the home government is higher than in the basic model.