That climate policies are costly is evident and therefore often creates major fears. But the alternative (no action) also has a cost. Mitigation costs and damages incurred depend on what the climate policies are; moreover, they are substitutes. This brings climate policies naturally in the realm...

Two theses on the likelihood of international co-operation for achieving international optimality in transboundary pollution problems are being confronted: a pessimistic one and an optimistic one. On the one hand a "Small Stable Coalitions" (SSC) thesis — based on the stability of coalitions...

International environmental agreements aiming at correcting negative externalities generated by transboundary pollution are difficult to achieve for many reasons. Important obstacles arise from asymmetry in costs and benefits, and instability may occur due to the fact that coalitions of...

In this paper we test empirically with the Nordhaus and Yang (1996) RICE model the core property of the transfer scheme advocated by Germain, Toint and Tulkens (1997). This scheme is designed to sustain full co-operation in a voluntary international environmental agreement by making all...

Calling upon both positive and normative economics, we attempt to characterise the issues at stake in the current international negotiations on climatic change. We begin (Section 2) by reviewing the main features of the Protocol. Then (Section 3), we identify by means of an elementary economic...

The paper proves the existence and uniqueness of a noncooperative steady state in the context of a model of climate change. It also explores the possibility of cooperation and attainment of an optimal steady state. It is shown that the problem is similar to that in the static model (Chander and...

In this paper we introduce the CLIMNEG World Simulation (CWS) model for simulating cooperative game theoretic aspects of global climate negotiations. The model is derived from the seminal RICE model by Nordhaus and Yang (1996). We first state the necessary conditions that determine optimal...

This article deals with cooperation issues in international pollution problems in a two di- mensional dynamic framework implied by the accumulation of the pollutant and of the capital goods. Assuming that countries do reevaluate at each period the advantages to cooperate or not given the current...

The usually assumed two categories of costs involved in climate change policy analysis, namely abatement and damage costs, hide the presence of a third category, namely adaptation costs. This dodges the determination of an appropriate level for them. Including adaptation costs explicitly in the...

The texts of the COP 21 Decision and its Annex are scrutinized from the particular point of view of the extent to which economic theoretic concepts can be considered to inspire them. While this is shown to be partially the case in some of the intentions, the texts themselves contain more...