Unprecedented industrial development in Indonesia during the last two decades, accompanied by a growing population, has increased the amount of environmental damage. One of the most important environmental problems is that the level of air pollution in several large cities has become alarming,...

We compare a tax with thresholds (‘prices’), and tradable permits (‘quantities’), as mechanisms to control total ‘emissions’ (or other inputs or outputs) from heterogeneous parties with uncertainties in emissions, costs and benefits. The advantage of prices over quantities is much...

The Next Step for Climate Change Policy

The third Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will be held in Kyoto in early December. These upcoming negotiations, aimed at reducing future emissions of greenhouse gases, are almost certain to accomplish nothing. Failure is likely because the...

International Permit Trading: Creating a Sustainable System

The McKibbin-Wilcoxen Proposal for Global Greenhouse Abatement

We compare three different views on the long run efficiencies of emission taxes which include thresholds, and of tradable emission permits where some permits are initially free. The differences are caused by different assumptions about whether thresholds and free permits should be subsidies...

In earlier papers we have argued that the Kyoto Protocol is not sustainable as a global climate change policy and have proposed an alternative policy regime based on a coordinated but decentralised system of national permit trading systems with a fixed internationally negotiated price for...

We use an econometrically estimated multi-region, multi-sector general equilibrium model of the world economy to examine the effects of the tradable emissions permit system proposed in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, under various assumptions about that extent of international permit trading. We focus,...