Optimal emission pricing in the presence of international spillovers: Decomposing leakage and terms-of-trade motives

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Boehringer, Christoph; Lange, Andreas; Rutherford, Thomas F.
• 署名单位: Carl von Ossietzky Universitat Oldenburg; University of Hamburg; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2013.11.011
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 101-111
• 关键词: Optimal taxation; Emission leakage; Terms of trade

摘要

Carbon leakage provides an efficiency argument for differentiated emission prices in favor of emission-intensive and trade-exposed sectors under unilateral climate policy. However, differential emission pricing can be used as a beggar-thy-neighbor policy to exploit terms of trade. Adopting an optimal tax framework, we propose a method to decompose the leakage and terms-of-trade motives for emission price differentiation. We employ our method for the quantitative impact assessment of unilateral climate policy based on empirical data. We find that the leakage motive yields only small efficiency gains compared to uniform emission pricing. Likewise, the terms-of-trade motive has rather limited potential for strategic burden shifting. We conclude that in many cases the simple first-best rule of uniform emission pricing remains a practical guideline for unilateral climate policy design. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.