The lack of real progress at the Durban climate change conference in 2011—postponing effective action until at least 2020—has many causes, one of which is the failure to address trade issues and, in particular, carbon leakage. This paper advances two arguments. First, it argues that the...

Putting a price on carbon is critical for climate change policy. Increasingly, policymakers combine multiple policy tools to achieve this, for example by complementing cap-and-trade schemes with a carbon tax, or with a feed-in tariff. Often, the motivation for doing so is to limit undesirable...

Cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gas emissions are an important part of the climate change policies of the EU, Japan, New Zealand, among others, as well as China (soon) and Australia (potentially). However, concerns have been raised on a variety of ethical grounds about the use of markets to...

Debate about the relationship between environmental limits and economic growth has been taking place for several decades. These arguments have re-emerged with greater intensity following advances in the understanding of the economics of climate change, increases in resource and oil prices and...

Many models of economic growth exclude materials, energy and other intermediate inputs from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate. This paper explores the relationship between intermediate input intensity,...

This paper analyses the design of carbon markets in time (intertemporally) and space (geographically) from first principles, starting initially with a relatively clean slate and asking what an optimal global carbon market would look like by around 2030. Our focus is on firmlevel trading systems,...