 The Competitiveness Impacts of Climate Change Mitigation PoliciesWorking Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government Abstract: The pollution haven hypothesis suggests that unilateral domestic climate change mitigation policy would impose significant economic costs on carbon-intensive industries, resulting in declining output and increasing net imports. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, we undertake a two-step empirical analysis. First, we use historic energy prices as a proxy for climate change mitigation policy. We estimate how production and net imports change in response to energy prices using a 35-year panel of approximately 450 U.S. manufacturing industries. Second, we take these estimated relationships and use them to simulate the impacts of changes in energy prices resulting from a domestic climate change mitigation policy that effectively imposes a $15 per ton carbon price. We find that energy-intensive manufacturing industries are more likely to experience decreases in production and increases in net imports than less-intensive industries. Our best estimate is that competitiveness effects--measured by the increase in net imports--are as large as 0.8 percent for the most energy-intensive industries and represent no more than about one-sixth of the estimated decrease in production under a $15 per ton carbon price. JEL-codes: F18 Q52 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp15-046 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC. |
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