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...

In the last two decades increasing attention has been paid to the relationship between environmental degradation and economic development. According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis this relationship may be described by an inverted-U curve. However, recent evidence rejects the...

The US has repeatedly criticized the lack of „meaningful participation“ of developing countries in the Kyoto Protocol. I discuss the course of negotiations on developing country participation between the conferences at Kyoto in 1997 and Marrakech in 2001. The reluctance of developing...

This paper quantifies the macroeconomic impacts of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol based on a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of international trade and energy use. Employing project-based CDM supply data we assess the relative importance of transaction...

Has the Kyoto Protocol induced carbon leakage? We conduct the first empirical ex-post evaluation of the Protocol. We derive a theoretical gravity equation for the CO2 content of trade, which accounts for intermediate inputs, both domestic and imported. The structure of our new panel database of...

In the last two decades increasing attention has been paid to the relationship between environmental quality and economic development. According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis this relationship may be described by an inverted-U curve. However, recent evidence rejects the EKC...

This paper assesses the impact of the Kyoto Protocol on CO2 emissions. With this aim a dynamic panel data model is estimated for a cross-section of 213 countries over the period 1960 to 2009. The model, based on a STIRPAT approach, also integrates the EKC approach and specifically considers the...

The CDM plays an important role in the international GHG reduction activities. However, the distribution of CDM projects has been quite biased. Hence, considering the current distributional imbalance, this study was conducted aiming to identify the determinants of CDM project hosting in order to...

The CDM has promoted GHG reduction activities in developing countries. There is, however, a controversial issue of an unequal distribution of CDM benefits among developing nations. To date, some emerging economies have been receiving the majority of CERs while most LDCs have few of them. This...

Following the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, countries took up the difficult task of finding a common approach that would slow down the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere and delay changes to the planet's climate. A widespread concern among many of the participants...