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Sharing the burden for climate change mitigation in the Canadian federation
Author(s) -
Böhringer Christoph,
Rivers Nicholas,
Rutherford Thomas,
Wigle Randall
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
canadian journal of economics/revue canadienne d'économique
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.773
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1540-5982
pISSN - 0008-4085
DOI - 10.1111/caje.12152
Subject(s) - computable general equilibrium , greenhouse gas , welfare , climate change , natural resource economics , economics , microeconomics , ecology , market economy , biology
Dividing the burden for greenhouse gas abatement among the provinces has proven challenging in Canada and contributes to Canada's failure to limit emissions. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to compare a number of rules for sharing the burden of emission reductions among Canadian provinces. Because of the substantial heterogeneity among Canadian provinces, these different rules imply significantly different relative abatement effort among provinces, and also significantly different welfare implications. We compare these archetypal burden sharing rules to existing provincial emission reduction commitments and find that none of the standard burden sharing rules comes close to existing commitments.