China has embarked on an ambitious and unprecedented programme of energy reform and climate change mitigation. Yet the motivations for this important shift remain unclear. This paper surveys key central government documents and articles by China's leading energy academics to investigate the...

This paper provides a review of the literature on competitiveness and leakage concerns associated with differentiated climate abatement commitments among countries. The literature reviewed is not exhausted, but it is sufficient to provide a balanced view of both academics and policy circles....

In Australia, carbon emissions pricing is politically contentious. The current Labor government has implemented such a scheme, but the Liberal National Party (LNP) opposition has pledged to repeal the scheme should it be elected. This article accepts the well-established position of emissions...

China's capital-intensive, export-oriented, spectacular economic growth since launching its open-door policy and economic reforms in late 1978 not only has created jobs and has lifted millions of the Chinese people out of poverty, but also has given rise to unprecedented environmental pollution...

This paper explores the failure of countries to coordinate climate policies as an equilibrium outcome of a game where countries optimize in the face of both unprecedented economic and environmental uncertainty. Because issues associated with climate change are historically unprecedented and thus...

The Doha climate talks in December 2012, wrapped up lines of negotiation that were begun years before in Bali. Negotiators resolved contentious questions about the future of the Kyoto Protocol and finally put the constraints of the Bali agenda behind them. Now they need turn to developing by...

We review the historical literature on the economics of climate change with a focus on the evolution of the literature from some of the early classic papers to the latest contributions. We divide the paper into three main sections: trends in greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation, and adaptation.

Economists were able to formulate and recommend policy approaches for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (mitigation) by drawing on an existing body of economic theory related to externalities. However, no comparably straightforward approach has yet emerged in the adaptation literature,...

Several developing economies have announced carbon emissions targets for 2020 as part of the negotiating process for a post-Kyoto climate policy regime. China and India¹s commitments are framed as reductions in the emissions intensity of the economy by 40-45% and 20-25% respectively between...

The numerical certainty scale (NCS) and polychotomous choice (PC) methods are two widely used techniques for measuring preference uncertainty in contingent valuation (CV) studies. The NCS follows a numerical scale and the PC is based on a verbal scale. This paper presents results of two...