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on Resource Economics |
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Issue of 2016‒01‒18
three papers chosen by |
| By: | David I. Stern (Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University) |
| Abstract: | The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) has been the dominant approach among economists to modeling aggregate pollution emissions and ambient pollution 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, while economic growth has had a monotonic positive effect on carbon and sulfur emissions, the EKC holds for concentrations of particulates. Negative time effects are important for sulfur emissions. The EKC seems to be most useful for modeling the ambient concentrations of pollutants it was originally applied to. |
| Keywords: | air pollution; economic growth; environmental Kuznets curve; convergence; climate change |
| JEL: | Q53 Q56 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:een:ccepwp:1514&r=res |
| By: | Thomas Eichner; Rüdiger Pethig |
| Keywords: | climate coalition, deposit, fuel, Nash, self-enforcing IEA |
| JEL: | C72 Q38 Q58 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sie:siegen:176-15&r=res |
| By: | William Brock; Anastasios Xepapadeas |
| Abstract: | Polar amplification is an established scientific fact which has been associated with the surface albedo feedback and to heat and moisture transport from the Equator to the Poles. In this paper we unify a two-box climate model, which allows for heat and moisture transport from the southern region to the northern region, with an economic model of welfare optimization. Our main contribution is to show that by ignoring spatial heat and moisture transport and the resulting polar amplification, the regulator may overestimate or underestimate the tax on GHG emissions. The direction of bias depending on the relations between marginal damages from temperature increase in each region. We also determine the welfare cost when a regulator mistakenly ignores polar amplification. Finally we show the adjustments necessary to the market discount rate due to transport phenomena as well as how our two-box model can be extended to Ramsey-type optimal growth models. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical results. |
| Keywords: | Polar amplification, spatial heat and moisture transport, optimal policy, emission taxes, market discount rate |
| JEL: | Q54 Q58 |
| Date: | 2016–01–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aue:wpaper:1601&r=res |