Environmental Markets: Equity and Efficiency

✍ Scribed by Graciela Chichilnisky (editor); Geoffrey Heal (editor)

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 306
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

As human societies grapple with the scarcity of environmental resources—clean water, biodiversity, and atmospheric quality—environmental markets will achieve an important role in the global economy. Along with markets for knowledge, they may become the most important institutions in the world economy during the coming century. Environmental Markets offers authoritative economic results and cutting-edge ideas on the equity and efficiency of the environmental markets of the future.

Markets are increasingly central to the resolution of environmental problems. They played a critical role in implementing the 1990 Clean Air Act of the United States, which has been instrumental in reducing acid rain in a cost-effective manner. They are also central to the global strategy adopted for limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and are being used for resolving conflicts over the use of other environmental resources, particularly water.

Environmental Markets: Equity and Efficiency represents the first systematic and in-depth study of the economic issues raised by this growing use of environmental markets. Focusing on the relationship between equity and efficiency—which is central to many of the debates between industrial and developing countries—the book explores the underlying economics and the possibilities for win-win solutions that benefit all parties to the problems.

Graciela Chichilnisky and Geoffrey Heal have been instrumental in developing the economic understanding required for the operation of environmental markets and for promoting their use among policy makers leading to the Kyoto Protocol. Contributors to this volume include established experts from international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and academia, including Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, who chaired the negotiating committee of the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto meetings.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Markets for Tradable Carbon Dioxide Emission Quotas: Principles and Practice
3. Equity and Efficiency in Environmental Markets: Global Trade in Carbon Dioxide Emissions
4. Emissions Constraints, Emission Permits, and Marginal Abatement Costs
5. Equilibrium and Efficiency: International Emission Permits Markets
6. Efficiency Properties of a Constant-Ratio Mechanism for the Distribution of Tradable Emission Permits
7. Who Should Abate Carbon Emissions? An International Viewpoint
8. Differentiated or Uniform International Carbon Taxes: Theoretical Evidences and Procedural Constraints
9. Efficiency and Distribution in Computable Models of Carbon Emission Abatement
10. Securitizing the Biosphere
11. Equity and Efficiency in Emission Markets: The Case for an International Bank for Environmental Settlements
12. The Clean Development Mechanism: Unwrapping the ‘‘Kyoto Surprise"
13. Knowledge and the Environment: Markets with Privately Produced Public Goods
14. A Commentary on the Kyoto Protocol
Append
ix. The Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
List of Contributors
Index