We analyze the economic effects of the differentiated targets for carbon abatement in six European Union member states. Our recursively-dynamic model includes a detailed representation of trade and energy consumption and incorporates optimistic projections for future energy markets provided by...

In the context of climate protection policy it has been suggested that global CO2 emissions should be reduced significantly (contraction) and that per capita emissions should gradually be equalized across countries (convergence). This paper uses a dynamic multi-region computable general...

In the debate on the premature phase-out of nuclear power generation in Germany, there is an intense dispute on the effective operating time for the existing nuclear power plants. This paper addresses the question of how alternative phase-out regulations affect both the magnitude of total...

Germany has committed itself to reducing its carbon emissions by 25 percent in 2005 as compared to 1990 emission levels. To achieve this goal, the government has recently launched an environmental tax reform which entails a continuous increase in energy taxes in conjunction with a...

Our paper deals with the welfare and employment effects of green tax reforms. In the first part we develop a flexible, interactive simulation model which is accessible under http://brw.zew.de. Users can specify their own green tax reforms or emission quotas and quantify welfare and employment...

The allocation of emissions entitlements across countries is the single most controversial issue in international climate policy. Extreme positions within the policy debate range from entitlement based on current emission patterns (CEP) to equal-per-capita (EPC) allocations.Convergence (COV)...

This paper investigates the economic impacts of two policy proposals: "Strom ohne Atom" (SOA) and "Moratorium Plus" (MOP), both of which contain a premature phase-out of nuclear power in Switzerland. While MOP restricts business-as-usual operation time of existing nuclear power plants to 40...

This paper deals with a special type of voluntary approach to protect the environment, for example, that we would like to term voluntary commitment. Its major characteristic is that it represents a unilateral declaration without a decisively active role of regulators. In other words, voluntary...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...