Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/171654 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
Economics Working Paper Series No. 15/211
Publisher: 
ETH Zurich, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research, Zurich
Abstract: 
Effective climate policy can be achieved by implementing either a global uniform carbon price or a global cap and trade system. But depending on the allocation of tax revenues and initial pollution per-mits, the instruments have very different wealth implications for the individual countries. The paper highlights the distributional effects of climate policies by calculating and comparing emission budget alloca-tions under three different schemes that are in line with a 2?C warm-ing target. We calculate implicit carbon budgets up to 2050 under a globally uniform CO2 price, a design proposed by Weitzman (2014). We then compare the allocation with the budget derived from equity principles by Bretschger (2013) and with emission budgets under egalitarian emission rights as proposed by BASIC (2011). Our results show that implicit burden sharing across countries varies substantially with the different policy regimes. Wealthy countries with low energy prices tend to obtain the highest emission budget under a price scheme while poor low-emission countries receive the highest budget under egalitar-ian emission rights. The budget positions of India and the US are illustrative for the conflicting country interests.
Subjects: 
Climate change policy
greenhouse gas emissions
uniform carbon tax
equity principles
JEL: 
Q58
Q53
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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