Supplementarity: An Invitation to Monopsony?
A. Denny Ellerman and
Ian Sue Wing
The Energy Journal, 2000, vol. Volume21, issue Number 4, 29-59
Abstract:
Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol allows Annex B parties to meet their greenhouse gas emissions commitments by emissions trading so long as such trading is "supplemental" to domestic abatement actions. Whether and how "supplemental" should be defined is one of the most contentious issues in the post-Kyoto climate negotiations. We demonstrate that implementing supplementarity by imposing concrete ceilings on permit imports in a market for tradable emissions rights gives rise to monopsonistic effects similar to those that characterize a buyers' cartel. We assess the EU proposal on supplementarity in this context. Our results show that, under the most favorable assumptions, the proposal avoids the redistributive effects of an import limit, albeit at added cost. Under less favorable assumptions, namely, that the required demonstrations of verifiable abatement cannot be made, the EU proposal severely limits emissions trading and the associated reductions in the costs of achieving the Kyoto commitments.
JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=1350 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.
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:aen:journl:2000v21-04-a02
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().