Anticipated International Environmental Agreements

Ömer T. Açikgöz and Hassan Benchekroun

Cahiers de recherche from Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ

Abstract: Consider a two-period transboundary stock pollution game in which countries anticipate an international environmental agreement (IEA) to be in effect in the future (i.e., in period 2). What will be the impact of the future IEA on current emissions (i.e., in period 1)? We show that the answer to this question is ambiguous. We examine a fi rst type of IEA where countries anticipate that the level of emissions in period 2 will be set at an agreed upon target. Assuming that the countries can commit to this policy, we show that when this target is set close to the business-as-usual (BAU) level of emissions, the equilibrium level of emissions in period 1 falls below its BAU level. However, the emission level in period 1 is a decreasing function of the target that will prevail in period 2, hence, the impact of this policy on period 1 emissions may be ambiguous, and in general depend on the targeted emission level. We also examine other types of IEAs where countries cannot commit to an emission level but rather commit to an emission policy rule that depends on the level of pollution stock.

Keywords: international environmental agreements; climate agreement; future agreements; transboundary pollution; dynamic games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q53 Q54 Q58 Q59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cireqmontreal.com/wp-content/uploads/cahiers/07-2015-cah.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Anticipated international environmental agreements (2017)
Working Paper: Anticipated International Environmental Agreements (2016)
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:mtl:montec:07-2015

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sharon BREWER ().