Simulating coalitionally stable burden sharing agreements for the climate change problem

In this paper we test empirically with the Nordhaus and Yang (1996) RICE model the core property of the transfer scheme advocated by Germain, Toint and Tulkens (1997). This scheme is designed to sustain full cooperation in a voluntary internationalenvironmental agreement by making all countries at least as well off as theywould be by joining coalitions adopting emission abatement policies that maximize their coalition payoff; under the scheme no individual country, nor any subset of countries would have an interest in leaving the international environmental agreement. The simulations show that the transfer scheme yields an allocation in the core of the carbon emission abatement game associated with the RICE model. Finally, we discuss some practical implications of the transfer scheme for current climate negotiations.