With countries from around the world set to meet in Copenhagen to try to hammer out a post-2012 climate change agreement, no one would disagree that a U.S. commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions is essential to such a global pact. However, despite U.S. president Obama's recent announcement...

The climate-trade nexus gains increasing attention as governments are taking great efforts to forge a post-2012 climate change regime to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. This raises the issues of the scope of trade-related measures and of when and how they could be used. This paper discusses how far...

This paper studies the formation of self-enforcing global environmental agreements in a world economy with international trade and two groups of countries that differ with respect to fuel demand and environmental damage. It investigates whether the signatories’ threat to embargo (potential)...

An important source of political opposition to measures aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) arises from concerns over their negative effects on the competitiveness of domestic firms, especially those that are energy-intensive and exposed to competition from foreign producers....

Paragraph 31(iii) of the Doha Ministerial Declaration mandates to the liberalization of environmental goods and services. This mandate offers a good opportunity to put climate-friendly goods and services on a fast track to liberalization. Agreement on this paragraph should represent one...

A two-tier climate club exploits the comparative advantage of large countries to mete out punishments through trade, while taking their capacity to resist punishment as a constraint. Countries outside the coalition price carbon at a fixed fraction of the average carbon price adopted within the...

In this paper, we discuss the endogenous formation of climate coalitions in an issue-linkage regime. In particular, we propose to build a link to the issue of preferential free trade. Trade privileges exclusively granted to members of the climate coalition work as an incentive mechanism for...

The present paper analyzes the impact of a climate coalition's border carbon adjustment on emissions from commodity production, welfare and the coalition size. The coalition implements border carbon adjustment to reduce carbon leakage and to improve its terms of trade, while the fringe abstains...

This study uses GLOBIOM ‒ the most detailed global economic model of agriculture, land use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions ‒ to assess the effectiveness of different policies in cutting net emissions from the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector, with a view to helping...