We investigate how the U.S. withdrawal and the amendments of the Bonn climate policy conference in 2001 will change the economic and environmental impacts of the Kyoto Protocol in its original form. Based on simulations with a large-scale computable general equilibrium model, we find that U.S....

Energy markets and energy-intensive industries in all EU member states – especially in Germany – are subject to a diverse set of policies related to climate change. We analyse the potential efficiency losses from simultaneous application of emission taxes and emissions trading in qualitative...

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...

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 advocates computable general equilibrium models as a methodological tool that is particularly suitable for measuring the impacts of policy interference on the three dimensions of sustainable development, i.e. environmental quality, economic performance (gross efficiency) and equity....

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)...

In the tax policy debate, differentiation of value-added taxes is often justified by distributional concerns. Our quantitative analysis for Germany indicates that such concerns are misplaced. We find that the abolition of VAT differentiation has only negligible redistributive effects. Instead,...

Sustainability indices for countries provide a one-dimensional metric to valuate country-specific information on the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, environmental, and social conditions. At the policy level, they suggest an unambiguous yardstick against which a country?s...

We present a decomposition approach for integrated assessment modeling of climate policy based on a linear approximation of the climate system. Our objective is to demonstrate the usefulness of decomposition for integrated assessment models posed in a complementarity format. First, the...

Die Klimaschutzdiskussion wird von der Frage dominiert, welche gesamtwirtschaftlichen Kosten mit der Umgestaltung des Energiesystems zu klimaverträglichen Strukturen verbunden sind. Höhe und Verteilung dieser Kosten entscheiden darüber, ob sich umweltpolitische Strategien zum nachhaltigen...