Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/93384 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 4618
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
International trade policy analysis has tended to focus on the production side of general equilibrium, with policies such as a tariff or carbon tax affecting international and internal income distributions through a Heckscher-Ohlin nexus of factor intensities and factor endowments. Here I move away from this structure to focus on demand, preferences, and endogenous policies set in a cooperative or non-cooperative manner. The specific context I choose is an international environmental externality such as carbon emissions, and I assume a high income elasticity of demand for environmental quality. I analyze how per-capita income levels of and differences between two countries affect their abatement efforts in a non-cooperative policy-setting game. This outcome can then be used as a disagreement point to analyze cooperative Nash bargaining. In both outcomes, the poor country makes a lower abatement effort in equilibrium; indeed, it may make none at all and cooperative bargaining with only abatement levels as an instrument may offer no gains. Other features include a novel terms-of-trade externality in which an abating country passes on a part of its abatement cost to its trading partner, in which case the non-cooperative and cooperative outcomes are identical under special symmetry assumptions. When per-capita income differences are large, the poor country may be worse off when the rich country abates. Finally, I examine “issue linking” in international bargaining, in which one country is both large and rich, and hence has both a high tariff and a high abatement effort in a non-cooperative equilibrium.
Subjects: 
trade and environment
per-capita income
environmental policy
JEL: 
F00
F18
F21
Q56
Document Type: 
Working Paper
Appears in Collections:

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.