Regional Variation, Holdouts, and Climate Treaty Negotiations

36 Pages Posted: 4 Mar 2012 Last revised: 17 Jul 2013

See all articles by James Scott Holladay

James Scott Holladay

University of Tennessee

Michael A. Livermore

University of Virginia School of Law

Date Written: June 1, 2013

Abstract

We develop a model of international agreements to price a transboundry externality and provide a new heuristic to aid in interpreting negotiation behavior. Under conservative assumptions a country's net benefits will be positive under an efficient pollution price if its share of global damages is less than half its share of world-wide abatement costs. We solve for a permit allocation scheme consistent with that heuristic such that every region will have positive net benefits in an agreement to price the pollution externality at the globally efficient level. We then apply this framework to climate change using regional data from Integrated Assessment Models and test the feasibility of a global climate change treaty. The results indicate that several regions have positive net benefits from a globally efficient price on carbon, including Western Europe, South Asia (including India) and Latin America. We then solve for a permit allocation scheme that should produce worldwide agreement on a climate treaty and show that allowing differential carbon taxes would produce tax rate differences of an order of magnitude. We argue that shares of global GDP might be an appropriate proxy for exposure to climate damages and a global climate treaty would be cost-benefit justified without transfers when viewed through that prism.

Keywords: Transboundry Pollution, Climate Change, International Climate Policy, Developing Countries

JEL Classification: Q54, F51, H23

Suggested Citation

Holladay, James Scott and Livermore, Michael A., Regional Variation, Holdouts, and Climate Treaty Negotiations (June 1, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2015024 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2015024

James Scott Holladay (Contact Author)

University of Tennessee ( email )

508 Stokely Management Center
Knoxville, TN 37996-0550
United States

Michael A. Livermore

University of Virginia School of Law ( email )

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