The developed countries can meet part of their Kyoto commitments by investing in emission-reducing projects in developing countries (the Clean Development Mechanism, CDM). Since the developing countries have so far not been willing to accept binding emission commitments, the CDM has been the...

After the U.S. and Australian withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, and the extension of national quotas in the Bonn- and Marrakesh-agreements, meager environmental effects and a low price of emission permits is likely to be the outcome of implementation. This paper provides an analysis of these...

Recent contributions show that climate agreements with broad participation can be implemented as weakly renegotiation-proof equilibria in simple models of greenhouse gas abatement where each country has a binary choice between cooperating (i.e., abate emissions) or defecting (no abatement). Here...

One of the proposed alternatives to Kyoto’s cap-and-trade approach is a regime based on an internationally harmonized carbon tax. In this paper, we consider and compare the enforcement problems associated with a tax regime and a cap-and-trade regime, respectively. The paper tries to convey two...

The compliance enforcement system of the Kyoto Protocol provides only weak incentives for Parties to comply with their commitments. For example, the penalties for non-compliant countries are not legally binding, and moreover, there is no second-order punishment for those countries that fail to...

After the US withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and the extension of national quotas in the Bonn and Marrakesh agreements, meagre environmental effects and a low price of emission permits are likely to be the outcome of implementation. This paper attempts to analyze this scenario, mainly in...