Climate Policies and Economic Growth

Kari Alho

No 1024, Discussion Papers from The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy

Abstract: A Climate Agreement, like the one reached in Kyoto in 1997, on reducing greenhouse gas emissions may have important effects on the global and the national economies. The aim of this paper is to make some basic numerical evaluations of the economic effects of climate policies, imposing a ceiling on the use of energy input in production in a single economy. First, we make an evaluation under immobile and internationally mobile domestic factors of production, and infer how much international factor mobility, so-called carbon leakage, can magnify the adverse effects. Next, we introduce optimal endogenous growth, so that environmental policies can potentially lead to the introduction of less-polluting energy technologies. The general conclusion of this is that induced R&D in less-polluting energy technologies is likely to reduce the economic burden of climate policies only marginally. Under an internationally tradable emissions permit scheme, however, the endogenous technical change reacts quite vigorously to the price of the pollution right. Finally, we solve for the optimal subsidy to R&D in clean energy technology in a market economy, and find it to be quite sizeable.

Keywords: climate policies; growth; research and development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q43 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2006
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: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.etla.fi/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/dp1024.pdf (application/pdf)

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:rif:dpaper:1024

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.etla.fi/en/publications/dp1024-en/

The price is 10€.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kaija Hyvönen-Rajecki ().