On the Relation between Dual-Rate Discounting and Substitutability

Tomas Kögel

No 2009-10, Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Abstract: To justify substantial emission reductions, recent literature on cost-benefit analysis of climate change suggests discounting environment consumption with an environmental discount rate instead of a consumption discount rate that is usually used in cost-benefit analysis. The present study clarifies that whether or not this dual-rate discounting approach succeeds in justifying substantial emission reductions depends on whether or not environment and goods consumption are substitutes in the Hicks-Allen sense and in the Edgeworth-Pareto sense (substitutes in the Hicks-Allen sense implies the Hicksian goods demand to be increasing in the relative price of environmental goods, while substitutes in the Edgeworth-Pareto sense implies the marginal utility of goods consumption to be decreasing in environment consumption). Moreover, a low intratemporal elasticity of substitution between environment and goods consumption within a period contributes to a low environmental discount rate in comparison to the consumption discount rate, while a low intertemporal elasticity of substitution between composite consumption of different periods contributes to declining discount rates over time.

Keywords: Discounting; dual-rate discounting; environmental discount rate; cost-benefit analysis; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D90 H43 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/discussionpapers/2009-10
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/27491/1/dp2009-10.pdf (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:zbw:ifwedp:7489

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().