The effect of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon dioxide emissions

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on world emissions of a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. We use a large unbalanced panel data consisting of 177 countries from 1980 to 2006. The key finding of this paper is that there are structural breaks in the data that demonstrate the effects of the international agreement. While carbon dioxide emissions declined for industrialized (Annex B) countries since the signing of the international agreement, the effect of income per capita is much larger during these years. However in the same period, the effect of industrial production has declined not just for industrialized countries but for developing countries as well. The results are robust to the exclusion of the US and Australia as Annex B countries since they had not ratified the protocol by 2006.