The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Environment Agency (EEA) have developed a database which will help governments choose a mix of economic instruments and voluntary approaches for environmental protection. These new tools play an increasingly important role in many countries, supplementing or replacing various types of regulatory instruments. The database is now freely available to policy makers, researchers and the public.

This new database is available at:

http://www1.oecd.org/scripts/env/ecoInst/index.htm

and

http://www.eea.eu.int/products

It contains information on the use of economic instruments such as environmentally related taxes and charges, environmentally motivated subsidies, tradable emission permits, and deposit refund systems. It also outlines voluntary policy approaches such as environmental agreements, negotiated with industry, and public programmes in which firms can volunteer to participate. Pre-defined queries allow the user to extract information on all economic or voluntary instruments used to address a certain type of environmental problem in one or more countries. Other queries provide more in-depth information on each type of instrument.

The database covers 43 countries -Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, FYR Macedonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.