Carbon Policy and Technical Change: Market Structure, Increasing Returns, and Secondary Benefits. Final Report

An economic evaluation of the impact of policies intended to control emissions of CO{sub 2} and other ''greenhouse gases'' (GHGS) depends on the net costs of these controls and their distribution throughout the production sectors of developed and developing economics. The answers derived from appraisals of these net costs, in turn, stem from what is assumed about the timing of the controls, the pace of technological change, and any short-term secondary benefits from their control. There have only been a few serious attempts to estimate the economic benefits from the policies associated with such long run outcomes. All of the approaches to date have made fairly strong assumptions or relied on contingent valuation estimates of hypothetical situations