OFFSETTING NEW CO2 EMISSIONS: A RATIONAL FIRST GREENHOUSE POLICY STEP

This paper describes and assesses a policy to slow the increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the atmosphere. Policy governing new CO₂ sources would either prevent emissions, procure compensating emissions reductions, or sequester emissions in sinks. The paper uses electric power plants to demonstrate the mechanics of the policy and the control or offset choices. Offset options include scrubbing, fuel switching, investments in energy conservation and efficiency, and afforestation.
Costs per ton ofC0₂ sequestered range from $1.35 for planting shade trees to $59.41 for scrubbing. All options except scrubbing cost less than $11.00, and the median cost is around $6.00 per ton removed. Planting trees on erodible cropland in conjunction with the Conservation Reserve Program combines the goals of reduced erosion, surplus agricultural production, and greenhouse warming. This policy is a first sane step toward reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases. Having an international framework for managing emissions is most desirable. In the interim, however, the United States can demonstrate environmental leadership, generate substantial conservation benefits, and spark ingenuity in searching for alternatives, broadening the options, and lowering the ultimate costs of reducing CO₂ emissions.     

EQUITY AND EFFECTIVENESS OF POSSIBLE CO2 TREATY PROPOSALS

The Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbon control established an important precedent for global environmental treaties that include both developing countries and industrial countries. This paper evaluates seven possible treaty proposals to control carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Growth-rate control proposals fail on effectiveness of control or on equity differences between developing countries and industrial countries. Complex proposals link policies in population growth, economic development, world energy taxation, and forestation. These complex proposals, which appear to be both effective and equitable, can defer or avoid CO2 doubling.     

POLLUTION AND POLLUTION ABATEMENT IN THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

Building on the approach of Weitzman, as extended by Hartwick and Mäler, five models of national accounts in a dynamic competitive economy with pollution externalities are constructed: flow pollutants, stock pollutants, fossil fuels and CO₂, living resources and acid rain, and household defensive expenditures. The results measure welfare rather than national product per se . The general conclusions are that abatement expenditures should be treated as intermediate consumption, that adjustments need to be made for both pollution emissions and natural pollution dissipation processes, that marginal social costs should be used to value emissions, and that the level of environmental services must be valued in measuring welfare. Not only should household defensive expenditures not be subtracted from the welfare measure, under plausible assumptions the adjustment to welfare (as opposed to NNP) includes a value greater than the level of household defensive expenditure.     

Scenario Analysis of Chinese Passenger Vehicle Growth

This article reports on a simulation and scenario analysis of Chinese passenger vehicle growth and resulting energy demand and CO₂ emissions. The model includes provincial level logistic growth functions with saturation levels representative of neighboring Asian economies, income growth measured in international dollars, and both estimated and literature-based income elasticities. Scenarios explore variation in key parameters, including income and population growth rates, elasticity income ranges, fuel economy, and vehicle saturation. Countrywide base case results estimate growth from 4.22 to 54.33 passenger vehicles per thousand people from 1995 to 2025. Resulting passenger vehicle oil demands and CO₂ emissions increase nearly 17-fold.     

Emissions Trading, Wealth Transfers and the Wounded Bull Scenario in Power Generation

Electricity generators accept that emissions trading is fundamental to meeting CO₂ reduction targets. But unless a percentage of permits are allocated, existing generators will face non-trivial wealth transfers. Seldom contemplated in academic works are the adverse economic consequences of an all-auction approach to emissions trading. Using Victoria to illustrate, we find that once CO₂ prices exceed $17.50/t, the marginal coal generator facing large wealth transfers will withhold generating capacity to raise prices and recoup stranded investments, thus becoming a 'wounded bull' in the market place. This has material welfare implications with modelling results indicate an intermediate-run 300 per cent increase in wholesale power prices.     

Sustainability Policy and Environmental Policy

A theoretical, representative‐agent economy with a depletable resource stock, polluting emissions and productive capital is used to contrast environmental policy, which internalises externalised environmental values, with sustainability policy, which achieves some form of intergenerational equity. The obvious environmental policy comprises an emissions tax and a resource stock subsidy, each equal to the respective external cost or benefit. Sustainability policy comprises an incentive affecting the choice between consumption and investment, and can be a consumption tax, capital subsidy or investment subsidy, or a combination thereof. Environmental policy can reduce the strength of the sustainability policy needed. More specialised results are derived in a small open economy with no environmental effects on utility.     

Environmental policy instruments and imperfectly competitive international trade

Policy makers, industrialists and environmentalists express concern that the imposition of tough environmental policies in some countries displaces production, and hence pollution, to countries which impose less tough environmental policies. Yet empirical studies of such impacts suggest they are small. However, these findings are derived from models in which international trade is modelled as being perfectly competitive. In this paper I model trade as imperfectly competitive with scope for strategic behavior by producers, in this case investment in capital. I show that the choice of environmental policy instrument can have a marked impact on the incentives for producers to act strategically, with environmental standards significantly reducing the incentives for strategic overinvestment relative to environmental taxes or no environmental policy at all. Whether welfare is higher using standards or taxes depends on whether producing countries are also significant consumers of the polluting product, and on whether all producing governments act to reduce emissions or only some subset of governments. To assess the quantitative significance of these theoretical results I conduct policy simulations on a calibrated model of the world fertilizer industry. These simulations show that the impact of environmental policy on strategic behaviour can be large.     

Economic growth,industrialization, and the environment

In this paper, I argue the compositional shift from agricultural to industrial production – industrialization – is a central determinant of changes in environmental quality as economies develop. I develop a simple two-sector model of neoclassical growth and the environment in a small open economy to examine how industrialization affects the environment. The model is estimated using sulfur emissions data for 157 countries over the period 1970–2000. The results show the process of industrialization is a significant determinant of observed changes in emissions: a 1% increase in industry's share of total output is associated with an 11.8% increase in the level of emissions per capita.     

Do Lax Environmental Regulations Attract Foreign Investment?

There has been considerable controversy over the empirical significance of the theoretically predicted pollution haven hypothesis. Generally, empirical papers have failed to find an effect on industrial location of weaker or stricter environmental regulations. In this paper we find confirmation of theoretical predictions. We present a statistical test of the impact of environmental regulations on the capital movement of polluting industries. The empirical study is conducted by examining foreign direct investment (FDI) of several US industries, representing industries with high pollution control costs (chemicals and primary metals) as well as industries with more modest pollution control costs (electrical and non-electrical machinery, transportation equipment, and food products). At issue is the effect of the laxity of environmental regulation on FDI. As laxity is not directly observed, we posit two equations, one for FDI determination and one for pollutant emissions, a variable positively correlated with the unobserved variable. We use aggregate national sulfur emissions as the pollutant. Using instruments for the unobserved variable, the statistical results show that the laxity of environmental regulations in a host country is a significant determinant of FDI from the US for heavily polluting industries and is insignificant for less polluting industries.     

On Cost Benefit Rules for Green Taxes

This paper concerns the welfare effects of a green tax reform in a dynamic general equilibrium model with preexisting taxes on labor income and capital income. In comparison with previous studies on green taxes in dynamic models, which have focused their main attention on long run effects of such reforms, I derive cost benefit rules for a change in the tax mix by using the properties of the value function in optimal control theory. This enables me to relate the welfare effect of a change in the tax mix to responses in employment, the capital stock, (flow) emissions and the stock of pollution along the whole general equilibrium path. Another contribution of the paper is to examine under what conditions an emission tax, which is set permanently below the marginal damage of pollution, is welfare superior to an emission tax path that fully internalizes the external effect.     

Environmental capital flight and pollution tax

This paper analyzes the impacts of a production pollution tax on environmental capital flight and national product in a two-country static general equilibrium model with two-way foreign investment. It is assumed that the capital input in both countries is a composite good of domestic and imported capital. And pollution is assumed to originate in the production process. The productivity of capital in each country is negatively (or positively) related to the worldwide aggregate emissions.The analysis shows that when a domestic pollution tax is levied, domestic capital outflows increase and foreign capital inflows decrease for sufficiently high elasticities of substitution between labor (immobile input) and capital (mobile input) in both countries. Moreover, with negative transnational externalities, increases of a domestic pollution tax reduce domestic production and increase foreign production. The difficulty of substitution between immobile and mobile inputs hinders the optimal allocation of worldwide capital and national product. In this paper, the optimal pollution tax is based on global welfare maximization, not on global income maximization, taking into consideration the impact of income change on individual welfare. Therefore, an optimal pollution tax in the developing country should be lower for a given rate of pollution.     

Emigration and welfare in an economy with foreign capital

Discussion of the brain drain problem in the 1970s sparked considerable theoretical research upon the effects of emigration. In many cases, it has been determined that emigration reduces the level of welfare of the remaining residents in the source country, regardless of whether or not human capital is exported. In an economy producing traded and non-traded goods. Rivera-Batiz demonstrated that the level of welfare of the remaining residents declines as a consequence of emigration or at most remains unchanged. This paper generalizes the Rivera-Batiz model in another direction to examine the effects of emigration upon the welfare of remaining residents when foreign capital is employed in the economy. In contrast to other earlier studies, it is found that emigration improves the welfare of remaining residents if both they and the migrants have identical preferences and factor endowments. The author also compares the welfare implications of remittance flows back to the source country when they are used to finance consumption and when they are used to finance capital accumulation.     

Why Finance Ministers Favor Carbon Taxes,Even If They Do Not Take Climate Change into Account

Fiscal considerations may shift governmental priorities away from environmental concerns: finance ministers face strong demand for public expenditures such as infrastructure investments but they are constrained by international tax competition. We develop a multi-region model of tax competition and resource extraction to assess the fiscal incentive of imposing a tax on carbon rather than on capital. We explicitly model international capital and resource markets, as well as intertemporal capital accumulation and resource extraction. While fossil resources give rise to scarcity rents, capital does not. With carbon taxes, the rents can be captured and invested in infrastructure, which leads to higher welfare than under capital taxation. This result holds even without modeling environmental damages. It is robust under a variation of the behavioral assumptions of resource importers to coordinate their actions, and a resource exporter’s ability to counteract carbon policies. Further, no green paradox occurs—instead, the carbon tax constitutes a viable green policy, since it postpones extraction and reduces cumulative emissions.     

FISCAL POLICY IN AN ENDOGENOUS GROWTH MODEL WITH PUBLIC CAPITAL AND POLLUTION

This paper studies the growth and welfare effects of fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model with public capital and environmental pollution. I assume that pollution is due to aggregate production, and that it does not have a direct effect on production but only reduces household utility. I study the growth effects of fiscal policy for the model on the balanced growth path, taking transition dynamics into account. I then analyse the welfare effects of fiscal policy along the balanced growth path. Finally, I show how the fiscal parameters must be set so that the competitive economy replicates the social optimum.     

The environmental Kuznets curve after 25 years

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) has been the dominant approach among economists to modeling aggregate pollution emissions and ambient concentrations over the last quarter century. Despite this, the EKC was criticized almost from the start and decomposition approaches have been more popular in other disciplines working on global climate change. More recently, convergence approaches to modeling emissions have become popular. This paper reviews the history of the EKC and alternative approaches. Applying an approach that synthesizes the EKC and convergence approaches, I show that convergence is important for explaining both pollution emissions and concentrations. On the other hand, economic growth has a strong positive effect on carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but weaker effects on non-industrial GHG emissions and concentrations of particulates. Negative time effects are important for sulfur and industrial and non-industrial GHG emissions. Even for particulate concentrations, economic growth only reduces pollution at very high income levels. Future research should focus on developing and testing alternative theoretical models and investigating the non-growth drivers of pollution reduction.     

On the effects of human capital and R&D policies in an endogenous growth model

We introduce an external effect of existing technologies in human capital accumulation in an endogenous growth model and describe its steady-state and transition. We numerically solve the model to compare the quantitative effects of R&D policy with the quantitative effects of human capital policy in wealth and welfare. Although R&D subsidies have now an overall positive effect on growth, wealth and welfare, the calibration exercise shows that for plausible values for the parameters, human capital policy is simultaneously the most income and welfare-improving and the less expensive to the government.     

External balance,dynamic efficiency,and the welfare effects of unilateral and multilateral permit policies in interdependent economies

This paper investigates domestic and foreign welfare effects of unilateral and multilateral permit policies in a two-country overlapping generations model with producer carbon emissions. We show that the welfare effects of a more stringent cap on emissions depend on the external balance of the policy implementing country, the dynamic (in)efficiency of the world economy, and the preference for environmental quality. Under dynamic efficiency, the global welfare loss of policy implementation in a net foreign creditor country is lower than of a policy in the net foreign debtor country. Moreover, although the country which has unilaterally implemented a permit policy would gain from a multilateral policy, the associated welfare loss for the other country is larger than that of a unilateral policy abroad.     

Energy Taxes in the Netherlands: What are the Dividends?

In this paper the environmental and economic effects of the introduction of a unilateral energy tax in the Netherlands are analysed using an applied general equilibrium (AGE) model. The effects of a small user energy tax and a general energy tax are compared, while taking into account different tax recycling mechanisms. The model contains a great level of detail with respect to emissions and environmental indicators (greenhouse effect, acidification, eutrophication and waste), which is helpful for assessing environmental quality. The results show that the introduction of a small environmental tax reform not only improves the environment but also raises non-environmental welfare, which is due to an improvement of the efficiency of the tax structure.     

外商直接投资对中国环境污染影响的再考察——基于外资来源和行业差异视角

基于中国城市统计年鉴数据和中国工业企业数据库,采用GMM估计实证检验了外商直接投资(FDI)对于中国环境污染的影响效应。研究结果表明,FDI对于不同污染物的影响效应存在巨大差别,FDI提高了工业废水排放,降低了工业二氧化硫排放。进一步分析表明,造成这种现象的原因是港澳台投资和外国投资的质量和行业分布差异。港澳台投资具有负面的环境绩效,而外国投资对中国的环境污染状况具有改善作用。利用中国工业企业数据库,统计分析不同行业的外商资本金构成情况,发现不同来源的FDI在行业间的分布情况存在差异。FDI的质量和行业分布差异,导致FDI对不同污染物产生不同的环境效应。论文为学者们关于FDI对中国环境影响的争论提供了一个合理的解释,也对中国的引资政策和环境治理具有一定的参考价值。     

Pollution externalities,endogenous health and the speed of convergence in an endogenous growth model

Based on a dynamic general equilibrium model, we study the important link between pollution, health and growth during transition which has not received much attention in the existing theoretical literature on (semi-) endogenous growth. The focus of this paper is on the transitional dynamics behavior, with an emphasis both, on the asymptotic as well as on the average speed of convergence. We calibrate the model for a typical OECD country. On the basis of dynamic welfare calculations, which consider transitional dynamics effects, we show that welfare differences are most pronounced for an economy, which values health relatively highly and where the environmental tax change is more than just marginal. Hence, if an economy moves towards a more sustainable society, the policy maker should take into consideration transitional dynamic effects.