This brief aims to highlight some of the difficulties involved in elaborating a working border carbon adjustment (BCA) regime. It demonstrates both the tensions between the various possible BCA objectives and the necessarily imperfect options that are available for bridging the tension between...

This case study is part of the CEPS project ‘Climate for Sustainable Growth', whose main objective is to analyse the impacts of climate change mitigation measures on the three pillars of sustainable development: the economic, environmental and social dimensions. It analyses food labeling via...

The EU is considering implementing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. To inform the policy decision, we assess eight energy-intensive trade-exposed sectors in depth to distill what their characteristics imply for the shape of an ideal mechanism. The results highlight the difficulty of finding...

For Canadian policy makers, the relatively straightforward economics of a border carbon adjustment (BCA) is complicated in practice by four challenges. First, Canadian carbon-pricing regimes have been developed from the bottom up, being primarily designed at the provincial rather than the...

This paper investigates the optimal timing of greenhouse gas abatement efforts in a multi-sectoral model with economic inertia, each sector having a limited abatement potential. It defines economic inertia as the conjunction of technical inertia - a social planner chooses investment on...

The optimal timing, sectoral distribution, and cost of greenhouse gas emission reductions is different when abatement is obtained though abatement expenditures chosen along an abatement cost curve, or through investment in low-carbon capital. In the latter framework, optimal investment costs...