The European Union Emission Trading System and technological change: The case of the Italian pulp and paper industry

Fulvio Fontini and Giulia Pavan

Energy Policy, 2014, vol. 68, issue C, 603-607

Abstract: We evaluate the contribution of technological change in reducing CO2 emissions in the Italian pulp and paper industry during the first and second phases of application of the European Union Emission Trading System (EU-ETS). We decompose the variation in emission and emission intensity into three different types of effects: a composition effect, a technique effect and a scale effect. The composition effect measures the change in emissions and emissions intensity due to a shift in production towards products that cause less emissions. The technique effect measures the change per each type of product, thereby accounting for technology improvements in the production of each type of good produced. The scale effect singles out the reduction in total emission due to an overall reduction in output. We show that the first phase of the application of EU-ETS has led to a reduction in both emissions and emission intensity due to the composition effect. The technological change has had a limited negative impact on emissions in the first phase, while in the second phase there has been limited technology improvement in the industry. However, the figures of the scale effect show that the larger reduction in emission is due to the overall decrease in output.

Keywords: Emission trading; Pulp and paper industry; Technological change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513012640
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:enepol:v:68:y:2014:i:c:p:603-607

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2013.12.020

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().