Given the bleak prospects for a global agreement on coordinated policies to mitigate climate change, political pressure is increasing among industrialized countries for unilateral abatement. A major challenge thereby is the appropriate response to the threat of emissions leakage. Border carbon...

The Swiss energy strategy until 2050 envisages ambitious CO2 emission reduction targets along with substantial cutbacks in electricity consumption to establish a low-carbon economy without nuclear energy. Our computable general equilibrium analysis find that compliance with stringent CO2...

We show that imposition of a state-level environmental tax in a federation crowds out preexisting federal taxes. We explain how this vertical fiscal externality can lead unilateral statelevel environmental policy to generate a welfare gain in the implementing state, at the expense of other...

Dividing the burden for greenhouse gas abatement amongst the provinces has proven challenging in Canada, and is a major factor contributing to Canada's poor historic performance on greenhouse gas abatement. As the country aims to achieve substantial cuts to emissions over the next decade and by...

In the absence of effective world-wide cooperation to curb global warming, import tariffs on embodied carbon have been proposed as a potential supplement to unilateral emissions pricing. We consider alternative designs for such tariffs, and analyze their effects on global welfare within a...

Unilateral carbon policies are inefficient due to the fact that they generally involve emission reductions in countries with high marginal abatement costs and because they are subject to carbon leakage. In this paper, we ask whether the use of carbon tariffs—tariffs on the carbon embodied in...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) established under the Kyoto Protocol allows industrialized Annex I countries to offset part of their domestic emissions by investing in emissionsreduction projects in developing non-Annex I countries. We present a novel CDM modelling framework which can be...

Climate effects of unilateral carbon policies are undermined by carbon leakage. To counteract leakage and increase global cost-effectiveness carbon tariffs can be imposed on the emissions embodied in imports from non-regulating regions. We present a theoretical analysis on the economic...

In the abscence of a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, individual countries have introduced national climate policies. Unilateral action involves the risk of relocating emissions to regions without climate regulations, i.e., emission leakage. A major channel for leakage are...

Feed-in tariffs under the Renewable Energy Sources Act, the so - called Erneuerbare - Energien - Gesetz (EEG), have triggered a massive expansion of electricity from renewable energy sources in Germany over the last decade. The increase in non-competitive renewable power generation though went...