The Europe Union is about to lunch the world’s first greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme in history. This represents an enormous challenge because there is no previous experience with such an unprecedented scheme, and because its final outcome might shape the design of future environmental...

A considerable body of economic literature shows the adverse economic impacts of oil-price shocks for the developed economies. However, there has been a lack of empirical study of this kind on China and other developing countries. This paper attempts to fill this gap by answering how and to what...

The climate-trade nexus has become the focus of academic debate, and has gained increasing attention as governments are taking great efforts to forge a post-2012 climate change regime to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. With concerns about their own competitiveness and growing greenhouse gas...

The U.S. and China are the world’s largest and second largest CO2 emitters, respectively, and to what extent the U.S. and China get involved in combating global climate change is extremely important both for lowering compliance costs of climate mitigation and adaptation and for moving...

An overview is given of the growing number of regional associations in which states have entered into voluntary arrangements to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In particular, in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a number of northeastern states have joined to create a regional...

The Kyoto Protocol incorporates emissions trading, joint implementation and the clean development mechanism to help Annex 1 countries to meet their Kyoto targets at a lower overall cost. Using a global model based on the marginal abatement costs of 12 countries and regions, this paper estimates...

To point out the direction and focus of future international climate negotiations, this paper discusses how far developing country commitments can go in an immediate post-2012 climate regime. The paper argues that developing country commitments are most unlikely to go beyond the defined polices...

Emissions trading is an attractive candidate for implementing greenhouse gas mitigation, because it can promote both efficiency and equity. This paper analyzes the interregional impacts of alternative allocations of carbon dioxide emission permits within the U.S. The analysis is performed with...

This is an invited discussion on the Ye, Jin and Liu’s paper “Analysis of Advantages and Disadvantages of Implementation of AIJ for China”. It focuses on five issues or questions: the subject of the paper, China’s concerns about clean development mechanism, what China has done so far in...

Experience with existing multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) shows that trade measures agreed to within the MEAs themselves may not necessarily lead to a dispute between parties. On the contrary, there is a great chance that disputes may arise from national measures undertaken to fulfil...