瑞典政府应对气候变化的政策措施

本文介绍了瑞典政府当前应对气候变化的一些政策措施。首先是十大举措,包括加大气候能源领域的资金投入,在能源、建筑物设计、发展可持续城市、环境技术、运输、气候领域方面展开研发,通过税收调节和政府公共部门带头促使减排等;其次重视并严格执行欧盟节能减排目标;最后积极开展国际间的气候问题合作与援助。     

Distributional Preferences and the Incidence of Costs and Benefits in Climate Change Policy

We explore the relationship between willingness to pay (WTP) for climate change mitigation and distributional preferences, by which we mean individuals’ opinions about who should be responsible for climate change prevention and whether the share of climate change impacts borne by the poor is a cause for concern. We use 1,770 responses to an online stated preference survey. The domestic costs in our survey’s policy choice scenarios are expressed as a set of randomized shares across four different payment vehicles, and the international cost shares are randomized across four groups of countries. We also elicit respondents’ perceptions of the likely regressivity of climate change impacts under a policy of business-as-usual. WTP is higher when larger cost shares are borne by parties deemed to bear a greater responsibility for mitigation, and when respondents believe (and care) that the impacts of climate change may be borne disproportionately by the world’s poor. That WTP for an environmental policy depends on the distributional consequences of the policy is an unsettling result: efficiency assessments are typically assumed to be separate from equity considerations in most benefit-cost analyses.     

Optimal Climate Change Policies When Governments Cannot Commit

We analyse the optimal design of climate change policies when a government wants to encourage the private sector to undertake significant immediate investment in developing cleaner technologies, but the relevant carbon taxes (or other environmental policies) that would incentivise such investment by firms will be set in the future. We assume that the current government cannot commit to long-term carbon taxes, and so both it and the private sector face the possibility that the government in power in the future may give different (relative) weight to environmental damage costs. We show that this lack of commitment has a significant asymmetric effect: it increases the social benefits of the current government to have the investment undertaken, but reduces the private benefit to the private sector to invest. Consequently the current government may need to use additional policy instruments—such as R&D subsidies—to stimulate the required investment.     

异质性气候政策与出口低碳技术含量

本文围绕气候政策是否促进了出口低碳升级这一主题进行实证研究,利用中国省区面板数据,从全要素维度测算出口低碳技术含量,并基于市场和制度因素考察政策有效性。研究发现:首先,不同气候政策对出口低碳技术含量产生差异性的影响效果,节能目标政策能够提升出口低碳技术含量,排污费和碳市场均未产生激励作用,新能源补贴这一鼓励性规制具有积极的升级效果。其次,从气候政策的创新作用渠道来看,节能目标和新能源补贴显著推动了低碳技术创新,另外两种限制性政策未能诱发"创新补偿效应"。再次,由于产业分布的差异,规制措施在中西部地区产生更为显著的作用。随着地区市场国有化程度增加,政策的升级效果将会增强,而随着地区财政分权程度提高,政策的升级效果将会减弱。最后,本文在完善市场机制、依法加强规制强度以及提高政策执行效果等方面给出了相关建议。     

Cooperation and Competition in Climate Change Policies: Mitigation and Climate Engineering when Countries are Asymmetric

We study a dynamic game of climate policy design in terms of emissions and solar radiation management (SRM) involving two heterogeneous countries or group of countries. Countries emit greenhouse gasses (GHGs), and can block incoming radiation by unilateral SRM activities, thus reducing global temperature. Heterogeneity is modelled in terms of the social cost of SRM, the environmental damages due to global warming, the productivity of emissions in terms of generating private benefits, the rate of impatience, and the private cost of geoengineering. We determine the impact of asymmetry on mitigation and SRM activities, concentration of GHGs, and global temperature, and we examine whether a tradeoff actually emerges between mitigation and SRM. Our results could provide some insights into a currently emerging debate regarding mitigation and SRM methods to control climate change, especially since asymmetries seem to play an important role in affecting incentives for cooperation or unilateral actions.     

Optimum Growth and Carbon Policies with Lags in the Climate System

We study the optimal carbon tax in an economy in which climate change, stemming from polluting non-renewable resource, affects the economy’s growth potential. Our main contribution is to introduce and explore the natural time lag of the climate system between emissions and damages to capital accumulation in an endogenous growth setting. This allows us to investigate how optimal climate policy, and its interplay with climate dynamics, affect long-run growth and the transition of the economy towards it. Without pollution decay, a higher speed of emissions diffusion steepens the growth profile of the economy. With pollution decay, this leads to lower short-run but higher long-run economic growth during transition. Poor understanding of the emissions diffusion process leads to suboptimal carbon taxes, resource extraction and growth.     

A Dynamic Incentive‐Based Argument for Conditional Transfers*

We compare the long‐run effects of replacing unconditional transfers to the poor by transfers conditional on the education of children. Unlike Mirrlees’ income taxation model, the distribution of skill evolves endogenously. Human capital accumulation follows the Freeman–Ljungqvist–Mookherjee–Ray OLG model with missing capital markets and dynastic bequest motives. Conditional transfers (funded by taxes on earnings of the skilled) are shown to induce higher long‐run output per capita and (both utilitarian and Rawlsian) welfare, owing to their superior effect on skill accumulation incentives. The result is established both with two skill levels, and a continuum of occupations.     

Supply-Side Economics of Germany's Year 2000 Tax Reform: A Quantitative Assessment

Abstract. The paper provides an assessment of supply‐side economics following Germany's year 2000 tax reform. Investigated are a corporate tax cut, deteriorating depreciation allowances and imputation rules, and a private income tax cut. For this purpose, a neoclassical growth model is augmented by various fiscal policy parameters and endogenous corporate finance and calibrated with German data. The model is used to evaluate consequences of Germany's tax reform on production, firm finance and leverage, investment, consumption and welfare of a representative household.     

Possible Policies for Expansion

The Australian economy appears certain to be operating at well below full employment into 1992, or even longer. Further reductions in interest rates would operate on output only with long lags, and would be the most inflationary form of stimulus. But cuts in a wide range of indirect taxes, and tax incentives for new investment - especially if announced as temporary - would reduce the length and depth of the recession.
Results of simulations with macro-economic models for a number of countries imply that cuts in indirect taxes or in taxes on employment (either alone or in combination with other fiscal measures) reduce prices as well as stimulating employment and real output. Similar fiscal measures are likely also to improve the current account at any given level of employment or real output, and even more likely to increase the country's net wealth (private investment less the current account deficit).
Failure to adopt appropriate types of fiscal stimulus would reduce the benefits of microeconomic reform and make such reforms harder to achieve. Even if it were true that these forms of fiscal stimulus would not raise real output, the tax cuts in question would at least reduce inflation and could not then increase the current account deficit.     

The Distributional Impact of Public Goods Provision: A Veil of Ignorance Approach

The veil of ignorance approach is used to consider the redistribution implied by different tax-benefit systems. Assuming a (hypothetical) ex-ante situation in which individuals lack any knowledge about their future income, redistribution from rich to poor can be seen as a form of insurance. Taking redistribution and insurance as synonymous, the analysis derives cases of redistributionally neutral systems of taxation and public good provision.
JEL classification : H 23; D 30;, H 41     

政策脱轨效应:评估环境政策的新框架

目前我国尚未形成统一的环境政策评估规范体系,而对具体环境政策进行评估时,可能会因不同领域、不同视角、不同评估方法而带来不同的评估结果。针对现有环境政策评估体系存在的局限性,提出可以客观评估环境政策实施效果的框架:政策脱轨效应。从政策脱轨效应的定义、产生原因、分类及评估思路四个方面构建理论体系,同时根据脱轨效应理论框架分析我国不同时期的环境政策。该框架体系的基本特点是:将不同环境政策的评估统一到同一体系之下,以特定的模型和方法,评估环境政策实施是否存在脱轨效应。研究表明,环境政策实施后存在发生政策脱轨效应的可能性;消费品之间的替代(或互补)关系、单位环境效益和单位产量排污因子均会影响政策脱轨效应的产生;从脱轨效应角度分析,环境政策制定时的决策目标会影响政策实施效果,只有当环境政策以社会净福利为决策目标时,政策实施才可能避免出现政策脱轨效应,实现环境保护和经济增长的双重红利。     

气候变化伦理研究评述

气候变化日益成为国际社会的一个热门话题。关于对气候变化问题的国际辩论经历了一个从科学、经济学和政治学争论到伦理争论的历程。气候变化是一个典型的＂全球伦理问题＂,气候变化伦理问题的关键是利益冲突。要解决＂缓解＂和＂适应＂气候变化、碳排量分配的合理性、发展中国家的发展空间及其补偿等一系列问题,必须要对气候公正原则、共同而有区别的责任等问题获得共识。