SELF-ENFORCING INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL AGREEMENTS REVISITED

Alistair Ulph (alistair.ulph@manchester.ac.uk) and Santiago Rubio
Additional contact information
Alistair Ulph: University of Manchester

Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie)

Abstract: In Barrett's (1994) paper on transboundary pollution abatement is shown that if the signatories of an international environmental agreement act in a Stackelberg fashion, then, depending on parameter values, a self-enforcing IEA can have any number of signatories between two and the grand coalition. Barrett obtains this result using numerical simulations and also ignoring the fact that emissions must be non-negative. Recent attempts to use analytical approaches and to explicitly recognize the non-negativity constraints have suggested that the number of signatories of a stable IEA may be very small. The way such papers have dealt with non-negativity constraints is to restrict parameter values to ensure interior solutions for emissions. We argue that a more appropriate approach is to use Kuhn-Tucker conditions to derive the equilibrium of the emissions game. When this is done we show, analytically, that the key results from Barrett's paper go through. Finally, we explain why his main conclusion is correct although his analysis can implicitly imply negative emissions.

Keywords: international externalities; self-enforcing environmental agreements; Stackelberg equilibrium; non-negative emissions constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D62 F02 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2004-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published by Ivie

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ivie.es/downloads/docs/wpasad/wpasad-2004-23.pdf Fisrt version / Primera version, 2004 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Self-enforcing international environmental agreements revisited (2006)
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:ivi:wpasad:2004-23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers. Serie AD from Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Departamento de Edición (edicion@ivie.es).