Out by the Door, in by the Window. Politics and Natural Gas Regulation in Russia

Abstract : Through the ongoing debate about the deregulation of the Russian natural gas industry and the introduction of challengers to the dominant position of Gazprom, we examine the combination of vested interests that creates formidable obstacles to that evolution. We do so with particular attention to the role of several regulatory entities - the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), the Ministry of Energy (ME), and the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) – that have overlapping responsibilities with respect to monitoring competition, regulating tariffs, and defining and controlling technical standards. We analyze the role of these regulatory entities as meso-institutions, providing intermediation between the macro-layer within which policy-makers define ‘rules of the game’ and the micro-layer within which firms operate in a context of highly demanding technological requirements. In this perspective, an obvious question (without obvious answer) is: how far can meso-institutions go in making the natural gas market more effective and transparent while meeting the socio-technological requirements of this industry and remaining sheltered from political arbitrariness?

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Price Vs. Quantities with Multiple Countries

Abstract : What is the best policy to mitigate climate change and manage other multilateral public goods? To answer this question, this paper examines a policy-making game among several countries. Governments choose both a policy's intensity (i.e., how much price or how much quantity) and a policy's type: price or quantity (e.g., carbon tax or emissions quota). The analysis uncovers a novel form of inefficiency: countries could choose price despite the possibility of achieving higher social welfare from choosing quantity. The paper shows that the social welfare from non-cooperatively chosen quantities (e.g., emissions quotas) can dominate the social welfare from even first-best price levels (e.g., carbon taxes). Strikingly, if cost-shocks are global, then global carbon taxes are inefficient unless the marginal abatement cost function's slope exceeds the marginal benefit function's slope times 80,000. JEL Codes: C7, D8, F5, H21, Q28, Q58. Keywords: prices vs. quantities, policy instruments, global pollution

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Uptake or Not Uptake Gpp (green Public Procurement)? Does Public Governance Make the Difference? the Case of France

Abstract : Public authorities are major consumers. Public Procurement represents 10 to 20% of the GDP and an efficient public procurement process should help public buyer to value for money. Nowadays, public procurement is more than a process by which public authorities, such as government or local authorities, purchase work, goods or services from companies with the only value-for-money objective. Through the inclusion of environmental, innovation, industrial or social policy objectives in the public procurement rules it became a real Policy Instrument. Typically, introducing green criteria in the awarding procedure, what is called Green Public Procurement (GPP) or green purchasing, is supposed to make an important contribution to sustainable consumption and production. It is thus considered yet as one of the environmental tools among others (taxes, subsidies, norms) that the public authorities can use to push for an environmental policy at the State and local level. However, is it cost-effective? Buying green is far from being an easy and cheap task. Public buyers need to be aware and trained on how to buy green. How the evolution of Public Procurement Regulation has been put into practice? What are the determinants of GPP uptake? This paper addresses these issues in the case of French municipalities based on an original database build from public data on public procurement as well as from a survey of municipalities related to their behaviours in terms of sustainable public purchasing. Our aim is to study whether variables as the buyers’ GPP awareness, the governance of purchasing services and the size of municipalities influence the investment in green public procurement by municipalities. Moreover, we might highlight additional barriers as the lack of political motivation, the lack of training for buyers as well as a reluctance to change.

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