Harmonization of carbon taxes in international climate agreements

Michael Hoel ()

Environmental & Resource Economics, 1993, vol. 3, issue 3, 231 pages

Abstract: The use of some kind of carbon tax is often proposed as part of an international climate policy. One possibility could be an international climate agreement requiring a harmonization of domestic carbon taxes. It is shown that there are several practical difficulties with such an agreement, and that it therefore is unlikely that CO 2 emissions will be allocated efficiently between countries with this type of agreement. Alternative types of agreements include an international carbon tax, in which the governments of the participating countries pay a tax, in proportion to their CO 2 emissions, to an international agency. A very similar arrangement would be to introduce a system of emission permits which are internationally tradeable between governments. Under quite general conditions, agreements of these two types can be designed so that they are both efficient and satisfy whatever distributional objectives one might have. Under both of these systems, the choice of domestic policies could be left to the individual countries. A domestic carbon tax is an obvious policy response from a country participating in an agreement of this type. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1993

Keywords: Carbon tax; tax harmonization; climate policy; international climate agreements (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1993
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF00313159 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to 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:kap:enreec:v:3:y:1993:i:3:p:221-231

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/BF00313159

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().