Carbon tariffs: An analysis of the trade, welfare, and emission effects

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Larch, Mario; Wanner, Joschka
• 署名单位: University of Bayreuth; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Nottingham
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2017.09.003
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 195-213
• 关键词: Carbon tariffs; climate policy; gravity model; Copenhagen Accord; carbon leakage

摘要

The potential of carbon tariffs to restore competitiveness, avoid carbon leakage, and reduce global carbon emissions has been prominently discussed. To analyze the effects of carbon tariffs on trade, welfare, and carbon emissions, we develop a multi-sector, multi-factor structural gravity model that allows an analytical and quantitative decomposition of the emission changes into scale, composition, and technique effects. Our analysis shows that carbon tariffs are able to reduce world emissions, mainly via altering the production composition within and across countries, hence reducing carbon leakage. This reduction comes at the cost of lower world trade flows and lower welfare, especially for developing countries. Applying our framework to investigate the effects of the emission reduction pledges made by the Annex I countries in the Copenhagen Accord, we find that combining national emission targets with carbon tariffs would increase the Accord's effectiveness by lowering the leakage rate from 13.4% to 4.1% (with bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals of [11.5,15.8] and [3.3, 4.9], respectively). (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.