Consider a country with two regions that have developed differently so that their current levels of energy efficiency differ. Each region's production involves the emission of pollutants, on which a regulator might impose restrictions. The restrictions can be related to pollution standards that the regulator perceives as binding the whole country (e.g., imposed by international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol). We observe that the pollution standards define a common constraint upon the joint strategy space of the regions. We propose a game theoretic model with a coupled constraints equilibrium as a solution to the regulator's problem of avoiding excessive pollution. The regulator can direct the regions to implement the solution by using political pressure, or compel them to employ it by using the coupled constraints' Lagrange multipliers as taxation coefficients. We specify a stylised model of the Belgian regions of Flanders and Wallonia that face a joint constraint, for which the regulator wants to develop a sharing rule. We analytically and numerically analyse the equilibrium regional production levels as a function of the pollution standards and of the sharing rules. We thus provide the regulator with an array of equilibria that he (or she) can select for implementation. For the computational results, we use NIRA, which is a piece of software designed to min-maximise the associated Nikaido-Isoda function.

The burden sharing of pollution abatement costs raises the issue of how the costs are supported by entities (regions or industries) of a country that decides to reduce pollution, e.g., in the Kyoto Protocol context. This paper explores this issue in the framework of a dynamic endogenous growth 2 sectors - 2 regions - 2 inputs Heckscher-Ohlin model of a small open economy with an international tradable permits market. Given an "emission-based grand-fathering" sharing rule, capital accumulation is more negatively affected by the environmental policy in the energy intensive sector if energy and capital are complementary. But the picture could be different in terms of total sectoral revenue, depending on the evolution of prices. Finally, we show that the impact of environmental policy at the regional level depends crucially on the evolution of regional specialization patterns.

This paper develops a theory of optimal fertility behavior under mortality shocks. In an OLG model, young adults determine their optimal fertility, labor supply and life-cycle consumption with both exogenous child and adult mortality risks. We show that a rise in adult mortality exerts an ambiguous effect on both net and total fertility in a general equilibrium framework, while child mortality shocks unambiguously lead to a rise in total fertility, leaving net fertility unchanged. We complement our theory with an empirical analysis using a sample of 39 Sub-Saharan (SSA) countries over the 1980-2004 period, examining the overall effects of the child and adult mortality channels on both total and net fertility. We find child mortality to exert a robust, positive impact on total fertility but no impact on net fertility, whereas a rise in adult mortality is found to negatively influence both total and net fertility, whereas a rise in adult mortality is found to negatively influence both total and net fertility. Given the particular demographic profile of the HIV/AIDS epidemic (killing essentially young, active adults), we then conclude in favor of an ambiguous negative effect of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on net fertility in SSA.