Per-capita Income as a Determinant of International Trade and Environmental Policies

James Markusen

No 19754, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: International trade policy analysis has tended to focus on the production side of general equilibrium, with policies such as a tariff or carbon tax affecting international and internal income distributions through a Heckscher-Ohlin nexus of factor intensities and factor endowments. Here I move away from this structure to focus on demand and preferences. The specific context is an international environmental externality such as carbon emissions, and I assume a high income elasticity of demand for environmental quality. I analyze how per-capita income differences between two countries affect their abatement efforts in a non-cooperative policy-setting game. This outcome can then be used as a disagreement point to analyze cooperative Nash bargaining. In both outcomes, the poor country makes a lower abatement effort in equilibrium; indeed, it may make none at all and cooperative bargaining with only abatement levels as an instrument may offer no gains. Other features include a novel terms-of-trade externality in which an abating country passes on a part of its abatement cost to its trading partner, in which case the non-cooperative and cooperative outcomes are identical under special symmetry assumptions. When per-capita income differences are large, the poor country may be worse off when the rich country abates. Finally, I examine "issue linking" in international bargaining, in which one country is both large and rich, and hence has both a high tariff and a high abatement effort in a non-cooperative equilibrium.

JEL-codes: F1 F18 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
Note: EEE ITI
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Per-Capita Income as a Determinant of International Trade and Environmental Policies (2014)
Working Paper: Per-Capita Income as a Determinant of International Trade and Environmental Policies (2012)
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