Special Issue on Environmental Governance in Asia: Introduction

The Singapore Economic Review is publishing a special issue on “Environmental Governance in Asia”. The 2013 Southeast Asia haze, with its impacts ranging over several countries in the region, showcases the increasing urgency, complexity and interdependence in addressing environmental externalities for Asian countries. However, compared to studies of environmental problems and their regulations in the North America and Europe, the environmental governance in Asia is under-explored. Due to differences in ecological conditions, political institutions, and stages of economic development from the counterparts in the North America or Europe, the environmental governance in Asia has its unique features, which raise new and challenging research questions for scholars interested in this field.

This special issue covers a wide range of environmental issues, with focus on Asia. Three papers study environmental pollution in China (Huang and Chen; Kong et al.; Wong et al.).1 One paper studies waste sorting in China (Hao et al.). One paper examines the relationship between energy consumption, human capital and GDP for the ASEAN countries (Fang et al.). One paper conducts an impact assessment on ecotourism practices in India (Das and Chatterjee). Finally, two papers report findings from choice experiments and estimate preferences on air pollution abatement in China (Zhou et al.) and food safety in China (Lu et al.). In particular, several studies in this issue investigate certain special features in the Asian economies and societies and their implications for environmental governance, for instance, shadow economy in China (Huang and Chen) and the unique “One Country, Two Systems” in the special autonomous region of Hong Kong (Wong et al.). Below we introduce each of the papers included in the special issue.