An Evolutionary approach to International Environmental Agreements

Tiziano Distefano () and Simone D'Alessandro ()
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Tiziano Distefano: Department of Environmental, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

No 517, SEEDS Working Papers from SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies

Abstract: Our work contributes to explain the observation of two facts at odds: the number of signatories of international environmental agreements (IEA) has grown in time, meanwhile, the aggregate global level of greenhouse gas emissions is increasing at exponential rate. We introduce a novel multi-scale framework, composed by two tied games, to show under which conditions a country is able to fulfill the IEA: an Evolutionary Game which describes the economic structure through the interaction of households and rms' strategies; and a 2x2 one-shot Game, with asymmetric nations that negotiate on the maximum share of emissions. The distance between international environmental targets and country's emissions performances is explained in terms of heterogeneous economic structure, without the need to impose any free-riding behaviour. Consumer's environmental consciousness (micro level) together with global income (and technological) inequality (macro level), are found to be the key variables towards the green transition path. We provide analytical results paired with numerical simulations.

Keywords: International environmental agreements; asymmetry; evolutionary process; Multi-level perspective; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C72 C73 F53 H41 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2017-09, Revised 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-evo, nep-gth and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/0517.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)
http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/0517.pdf Revised version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: An Evolutionary Approach to International Environmental Agreements (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:srt:wpaper:0517

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