Suchergebnisse

Business leaders, government officials, and academics are focusing considerable attention on the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), particularly in the realm of environmental protection. Beyond complete compliance with environmental regulations, do firms have additional moral or social responsibilities to commit resources to environmental protection? How should we think about the notion of firms sacrificing profits in the social interest? May they do so within the scope of their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders? Can they do so on a sustainable basis, or will the forces of a competitive marketplace render such efforts and their impacts transient at best? Do firms, in fact, frequently or at least sometimes behave this way, reducing their earnings by voluntarily engaging in environmental stewardship? And finally, should firms carry out such profit-sacrificing activities (i.e., is this an efficient use of social resources)? We address these questions through the lens of economics, including insights from legal analysis and business scholarship.

Forward / Timothy E. Wirth -- Introduction / Joseph E. Aldy, Robert N. Stavins -- An elaborated proposal for a global climate policy architecture : specific formulas and emission targets for all countries in all decades / Jeffrey Frankel -- The EU emission trading scheme: a prototype global system? / Denny Ellerman -- Linkage of tradable permit systems in international climate policy architecture / Judson Jaffe, Robert N. Stavins -- The case for charges on greenhouse gas emissions / Richard N. Cooper -- Towards a global compact for managing climate change / R. Agarwala -- Sectoral approaches to a post-Kyoto international climate policy framework / Akihiro Sawa -- A portfolio system of climate treaties / Scott Barrett -- How to negotiate and update climate agreements / Bard Harstad -- Metrics for evaluating policy commitments in a fragmented world: the challenges of equity and integrity / Carolyn Fischer, Richard D. Morgenstern -- Justice and climate change: the unpersuasive case for per capita allocations of emissions rights / Eric A. Posner, Cass R. Sunstein -- Toward a post-Kyoto climate change architecture : a political analysis / Robert O. Keohane, Kal Raustiala -- International climate technology strategies / Richard G. Newell -- Mitigation through resource transfers to developing countries : expanding greenhouse gas offsets / Andrew Keeler, Alexander Thompson -- Possible development of a technology clean development mechanism in a post-2012 regime / Fei Teng, Wenying Chen, Jiankun He -- Global environment and trade policy / Jeffrey Frankel -- A proposal for the design of the successor to the Kyoto Protocol / Larry Karp, Jinhua Zhao -- Reconciling human development and climate protection : a multistage hybrid climate policy architecture / Jing Cao -- What do we expect from an international climate agreement? A perspective from a low-income country / E. Somanathan -- Climate accession deals : new strategies for taming growth of greenhouse gases in developing countries / David G. Victor -- Policies for developing country engagement / Daniel S. Hall, Michael A. Levi, William A. Pizer, Takahiro Ueno -- International forest carbon sequestration in a post-Kyoto agreement / Andrew J. Plantinga, Kenneth R. Richards -- Modeling economic impacts of alternative international climate policy architectures : a quantitative and comparative assessment of architectures for agreement / Valentina Bosetti, Carlo Carraro, Alessandra Sgobbi, Massimo Tavoni -- Sharing the burden of GHG reductions / Henry D. Jacoby, Mustafa H. Babiker, Sergey Paltsev, John M. Reilly -- When technology and climate policy meet: energy technology in an international policy context / Leon Clarke, Kate Calvin, Jae Edmonds, Page Kyle, Marshall Wise -- Revised emissions growth projections for China: why post-Kyoto climate policy must look east / Geoffrey J. Blanford, Richard G. Richels, Thomas F. Rutherford -- Expecting the unexpected : macroeconomic volatility and climate policy / Warwick J. McKibbin, Adele Morris, Peter J. Wilcoxen -- Epilogue / Richard Schmalensee -- Lessons for the international policy community / Joseph E. Aldy, Robert N. Stavins.

Negotiations pursuant to the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action appear likely to lead to a 2015 Paris agreement that embodies a hybrid climate policy architecture, combining top-down elements, such as for monitoring, reporting, and verification, with bottom-up elements, including nationally determined contributions from each participating country, detailing what it intends to do to reduce emissions, based on its national circumstances. For such a system to be cost-effective - and thus more likely to achieve significant global emissions reductions - a key feature will be linkages among regional, national, and sub-national climate policies. By linkage, we mean a formal recognition by a greenhouse gas mitigation program in one jurisdiction (a regional, national, or sub-national government) of emission reductions undertaken in another jurisdiction for purposes of complying with the first jurisdiction's mitigation program. We examine how a future international policy architecture could help facilitate the growth and operation of a robust system of international linkages of regional, national, and sub-national policies. Several design elements merit serious consideration for inclusion in the Paris agreement, either directly or by establishing a process for subsequent international elaboration. At the same time, including detailed linkage rules in the core agreement is not desirable because this could make it difficult for rules to evolve in light of experience.

The growing impact of regulations on the economy has led both Congress and the Administration to search for new ways of reforming the regulatory process. Many of these initiatives call for greater reliance on the use of economic analysis in the development and evaluation of regulations. One specific approach being advocated is benefit-cost analysis, an economic tool for comparing the desirable and undesirable impacts of proposed policies.