International concern about climate change has led to the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997, which contains legally binding emission targets for industrialized countries to be achieved during the commitment period 2008-2012. While proponents of the Protocol celebrate it as a breakthrough in...

Since January 1st the European Union has launched an EU-internal emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) for emission-intensive installations as the central pillar to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. The EU ETS may be linked at some time to a Kyoto emissions market where greenhouse gas emission...

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....

This paper investigates the implications of U.S. withdrawal on environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency, and the distribution of compliance costs taking into account market power of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) on emission permit markets. While exercise of market power on behalf of FSU...

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)...

We show that U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol is straightforward under political economy considerations. The reason is that U.S. compliance costs exceed low willingness to pay for dealing with global warming in the U.S. The withdrawal had a crucial impact on the concretion of the Protocol...

Ten years after the initial Climate Change Convention from Rio in 1992, the developed world is likely to ratify the Kyoto Protocol which has been celebrated as a milestone in climate protection. Standard economic theory, however, casts doubt that Kyoto will go beyond symbolic policy. In this...

Despite of the apparent failure of the Kyoto Protocol with respect to environmental effectiveness, it has established a broad international mechanism that might be able to provide a global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions during a second commitment period. In this paper we investigate the...

In its fight against climate change the EU is committed to reducing its overall greenhouse gas emissions to at least 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. To meet this commitment, the EU builds on segmented market regulation with an EU-wide cap-and-trade system for emissions from energy-intensive...

Three computable general equilibrium models are used to estimate the economic implications of a stylized version of EU climate policy. If implemented at the lowest possible cost, the 20% emissions reduction would lead to a welfare loss of 0.5-2.0% by 2020. Second-best policies increase costs. A...