Controlling Pollution in Transition Economies, ed-ited by Randall Bluffstone and Bruce Larson of the Har-vard Institute for International Development, has been published in 1997 within the Edward Elgar series New Horizons in Environmental Economics. Contributions have been written by environmental economists and pol-icy experts who are or have been involved in the design and implementation of the policies they describe. It is largely a collaborative work between local experts and experts from the Harvard Institute for International Devel-opment who are reporting on work in progress. The pur-pose of the book is to examine what the transition economies have been doing since 1989 or 1990 to im-prove environmental policy systems in order to achieve better environmental and economic outcomes than in the past. Of special interest is the use of mixed economic and administrative instruments for environmental manage-ment, with particular reference to pollution charges and source and facility level permits. The book contains chap-ters that present and analyze pollution charges systems in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

The Central and Eastern European and former Soviet Union experience of the past five years, reviewed in this book, holds useful lessons for other countries regarding how to develop complementary systems and how to inte-grate flexibility, costs effectiveness and tradability in the existing pollution control structures. In the concluding chapter, the editors outline a possible blueprint for im-plementing pollution permit and charge systems in transi-tion economies. They summarize lessons learned and provide recommendations as follows:

• Simplify systems and focus attention on the most im-portant pollutants.
• Choose national/regional policy objectives in terms of aggregate emissions levels or aggregate emission re-ductions linked to ambient environmental quality goals.
• Set annual performance standards codified in permits by pollutant and by facility, not by individual source (for example, by stack).
• Choose a core set of priority air and water pollutants and a two-tiered charge structure that is linked to facil-ity performance limits.
• Where possible, use abatement costs to guide the choice of charges and the jump between base and pen-alty rates.
• Develop cost-effective and non-adversarial approaches to implementation and enforcement.
• Use penalty charge rates to define levels of liability for accidental discharges and for deliberate evasion.
• Integrate the system of pollution charges into the gen-eral system of income/profits taxation (tax authorities can be responsible for collecting charges; pollution charges should be deductible for tax purposes).
• Charge levels must be clearly indexed for inflation, and such indexing must automatically occur each time period (for example, year or quarter).
• The creation of some form of pollution charge waiver and earmarked environmental funds are probably po-litical necessities in response to distributional con-cerns associated with charges.

Bluffstone, R.; Larson, B. A. (eds.): Controlling Pollu-tion in Transition Economies, Theories and Methods, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 1997, pp 279. Price (UK) 49.95 .