Climate and trade policies: from mutual destruction to mutual support

Patrick Messerlin (patrick.messerlin@sciences-po.fr)
Additional contact information
Patrick Messerlin: GEM - Groupe d'économie mondiale - Sciences Po - Sciences Po

SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL

Abstract: There is no doubt that trade and climate policies can be mutually destructive. But there are three strong reasons to suggest that they can also be mutually supportive: they have a common problem, common foes, and common friends. Mutual support would be much stronger if the world regimes for these two policies shared a few common principles. The climate community should feel at ease with the broad WTO principles of 'national treatment' and 'most-favoured nation', and rely on them in building its own treaty and institutions. The trade community should grasp the opportunity to benefit from the better disciplines on adjustment policies that it is hoped the climate community will design. These conclusions should put the many pending problems into a more positive perspective, and persuade negotiators to find pragmatic compromises, as was the case with the GATT. Using this perspective, the paper focuses on a few key issues, such as the definition of carbon border taxes and the reasons to ban carbon tariffs. Other cases of mutual support are examined. For instance, the climate community should not repeat the mistakes of the world trade regime in dealing with the developing and least developed countries.

Date: 2012-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01024537
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in World Trade Review, 2012, 11 (1), pp.53-80. ⟨10.1017/S1474745611000395⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01024537/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:spmain:hal-01024537

DOI: 10.1017/S1474745611000395

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Contact - Sciences Po Departement of Economics (guillaume.sarratdetramezaigues@sciences-po.org).