Analysis of an international environmental matching agreement

Countries participating in international environmental negotiations widely ignore secondary or ancillary benefits, which are not derived from a policy’s main aim. If in political reasoning, the urgency of the consideration of secondary benefits subsequently gets a higher weight, the necessity of an international renegotiation arises. This article proposes a matching scheme that does not require costly renegotiations for countries to change contributions to environmental protection when such updates in secondary benefits occur. The proposed scheme, where each country first agrees on matching-rate contributions depending on the other countries’ unconditional contributions, could adjust the international environmental protection efforts to a Pareto-optimal level without costly renegotiation. Copyright Springer Japan 2006