One way to obtain a global public good is to set up an institution to buy it, with the nations of the world contributing to the cost according to whatever sharing arrangements make political sense. An example would be the purchase of the services of national armed forces to carry out peacekeeping, with the cost separately apportioned. In these notes I suggest a way to exploit this approach to limiting accumulations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The “service” that produces the control is the reduction, by nations, in the levels of emissions over time from what they would otherwise choose, also known as the “business as usual” emissions path. In the scheme as envisioned, which could be used in a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, the fact that all nations are sellers of reductions ameliorates the enforcement problems typical of commitments to particular emission paths. Another difference from the Kyoto-style system: In the scheme sketched here, the distributive of burdens is explicit, rather than implicit in the allowable emission amounts. The conflation of distributive and allocational issues is, arguably, an unnecessary source of contention in the design of institutions to control anthropogenic effects on the climate system.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Department of Economics, Center for Economic Policy Studies. in its series Working Papers with number
106.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (David Long).
Related research
Keywords:
Find related papers by JEL classification: Q38 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Nonrenewable Resources and Conservation - - - Government Policy (includes OPEC Policy) Q48 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Government Policy
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)