The voluntary provision of a pure public good? Another look at CFC emissions and the Montreal Protocol

Ulrich Wagner

Oxford Economic Papers, 2009, vol. 61, issue 1, 183-196

Abstract: Based on their finding of a positive and nearly linear relationship between GNP and reductions of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions in the run-up to the Montreal Protocol, Murdoch and Sandler (1997) have argued that the treaty's initial emission targets were consistent with voluntary provision of abatement rather than cooperative behavior. This paper documents that their analysis relies on largely imputed emission data that overstate emission reductions compared to emission data that countries reported to UNEP. The imputation procedure appears to induce a spurious positive correlation between income and CFC reductions. In a replication of the econometric analysis using UNEP data, the hypothesis of a positive and linear relationship between the two variables is rejected. These findings call for a more cautious interpretation of emission targets set by the Montreal Protocol and alert researchers to important limitations of a data set that has been widely used in empirical studies of this treaty. Copyright 2009 , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpn021 (application/pdf)
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:oup:oxecpp:v:61:y:2009:i:1:p:183-196

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().