Paris after Trump: An Inconvenient Insight

Christoph Böhringer and Thomas F. Rutherford ()
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Thomas F. Rutherford: University of Wisconsin

No 72 / 2017, ZenTra Working Papers in Transnational Studies from ZenTra - Center for Transnational Studies

Abstract: With his announcement to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement US President Donald Trump has snubbed the international climate policy community. Key remaining parties to the Agreement such as Europe and China might call for carbon tariffs on US imports as sanctioning instrument to coerce US compliance. Our analysis, however, reveals an inconvenient insight for advocates of carbon tariffs: Given the possibility of retaliatory tariffs across all imported goods, carbon tariffs do not constitute a credible threat for the US. A tariff war with its main trading partners China and Europe might make the US worse off than compliance to the Paris Agreement but China, in particular, should prefer US defection to a tariff war.

Keywords: Paris Agreement; US withdrawal; carbon tariffs; optimal tariffs; tariff war; computable general equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D58 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-reg
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Working Paper: Paris after Trump: An Inconvenient Insight (2017)
Working Paper: Paris after Trump: An inconvenient insight (2017)
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