Suchergebnisse

Habitualmente las estadísticas oficiales consideran exclusivamente las emisiones que un país produce en el interior de su territorio. Este enfoque, conocido como "responsabilidad del productor", no tiene en cuenta el papel del comercio internacional. Esta limitación ha dado lugar a una perspectiva diferente para asignar las emisiones por países. Según el enfoque de la "responsabilidad del consumidor" un país es responsable de todas las emisiones asociadas a su demanda interior, independientemente de dónde se hayan producido. Este artículo estima, mediante la metodología input-output, las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero asociadas al comercio exterior de España y analiza las emisiones desde el enfoque del consumidor para el periodo 1995-2007. Metodológicamente se presenta una novedad importante: la aplicación del supuesto de la tecnología doméstica a nivel físico. La conclusión, con importantes implicaciones políticas, es que la demanda interna de España genera mayores emisiones de lo que reflejan los inventarios oficiales. Además, el desequilibrio entre las emisiones "contenidas" en las importaciones y las asociadas a las exportaciones fue creciente durante el período considerado, especialmente debido al comercio con los países no incluidos en el Anexo B del Protocolo de Kioto. ; Official statistics only consider the emissions generated within the borders of a country. This approach, called "producer responsibility", does not take into account the role of international trade. This limitation has given place to a different perspective on the attribution of emission responsibilities among countries. According to this new perspective of "consumer responsibility" a country would be responsible for all the emissions associated with the production of the goods and services for attending its domestic demand. This paper uses input-output techniques to account for the embodied emissions of greenhouse gases in Spanish international trade, and to analyse the emissions from the consumer perspective for the period 1995-2007. Methodologically this paper presents an important novelty: we apply the domestic technology assumption in physical terms. Our conclusion, with important political implications, is that the Spanish domestic demand generates higher emissions than those reported by the official inventories. Moreover, the imbalance between the "embodied" emissions in imports and exports has increased during the period of analysis, especially due to the trade with the non-Annex B countries of the Kyoto Protocol.

Fossil fuel subsidies (FFS) constitute one of the most obvious barriers to tackling climate change, as they encourage inefficient energy consumption and divert investment away from clean energy sources. According to the International Monetary Fund, FFS amounted globally to $233 billion in 2014, over four times the value of subsidies awarded to promote renewable energy. In this study an integrated assessment model is used to analyse the CO2 implications in the European Union of eliminating FFS and recycling the revenues to promote rooftop PV. It is found that eliminating FFS would give rise to a small reduction in CO2 due to fuel-switching from coal to gas. If the revenues were recycled to promote solar, then the CO2 reduction would increase from 1.8% to 2.2% by 2030. Eliminating FFS is not a panacea from the mitigation point of view, even if the revenues are recycled, but other important objectives, such as those related to renewable energy promotion and the reduction of air pollution, are advanced at zero cost for the government.

Mainstream literature on climate change concentrates overwhelmingly on technological solutions for this global long-term problem, while a change towards climate-friendly behaviour could play a role in emission reduction and has received little attention. This paper focuses on the potential climate mitigation by behavioural change in the European Union (EU) covering many behavioural options in food, mobility and housing demand which do not require any personal up-front investment. We use the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM), capturing both their direct and indirect implications in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Our results indicate that modest to rigorous behavioural change could reduce per capita footprint emissions by 6 to 16%, out of which one fourth will take place outside the EU, predominantly by reducing land use change. The domestic emission savings would contribute to reduce the costs of achieving the internationally agreed climate goal of the EU by 13.5 to 30%. Moreover, many of these options would also yield co-benefits such as monetary savings, positive health impacts or animal wellbeing. These results imply the need for policymakers to focus on climate education and awareness programs more seriously and strategically, making use of the multiple co-benefits related with adopting pro-environmental behaviour. Apart from that, the relevance of behavioural change in climate change mitigation implies that policy-informing models on climate change should include behavioural change as a complement or partial alternative to technological change.

AbstractThis article quantifies for the first time the European employment effects of extra‐EU exports and the correct number of jobs generated through the intra‐EU trade (single market) associated with the production of such exports. The literature has neglected very often the latter effects mainly due to the lack of an appropriate methodology and data. The main results of the article show that, between 2000 and 2007, an increasing number of European jobs were dependent on extra‐EU exports and on the strengthening of the trade linkages across the internal market. During the period considered, the EU employment supported by extra‐EU exports grew from 22 to 25 million jobs, out of which 9 million jobs (in 2007) were due to spillover and feedback effects associated with the single market. Between 2000 and 2007 the EU also became a more vertically integrated economy, and reduced the labour intensity of the extra‐EU exports.

The analysis focuses on carbon-motivated border tax adjustment (CBTA). CBTA are tariffs applied to imports designed to avoid drawbacks of emission reduction policies when only one or few regions (the abating regions) implement them. Through CBTA the abating regions level out different treatment applied to domestic and imported products. In this paper we focus on CBTA metric. Through a multi-region and multi-sector analysis we compute and compare two possible CBTA systems that the European Union could implement to complement a hypothetical carbon tax applied to domestic products. In one system, tariffs are computed based on the emissions generated abroad to produce the goods imported by the European Union. In the second system, tariffs are based on the emissions that the European Union would have generated to produce domestically the same products. Results at country and sector level contribute to better understand the effects of this instrument and to add information to the political debate on it. Moreover, an important contribution of this analysis is that we explore methodological issues that arise from the use of multi-region and multi-sector models to compute different CBTA metrics.