This policy brief explores the potential scope and optimal design of national climate policies in the European climate policy context. It argues that the recent German proposal of a climate levy for electricity generators (BMWi 2015) has the potential to reconcile EU and national policies....

Agriculture and forestry play an important role in emitting and storing greenhouse gases. For an efficient and cost-effective climate policy, it is therefore important to include land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) explicitly in economy-climate models. This article gives an overview...

The ongoing global financial crisis has been preceded by a steady rise in global current account imbalances. Recently, in the course of the global recession, global imbalances have declined, albeit without having disappeared completely. As the outlook for global growth gets brighter, it is...

Marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) are a favorite instrument to analyze international emissions trading. This paper focusses on the question of how to define MACCs in a general equilibrium context where the global abatement level influences energy prices and in turn national MACCs. We...

The analysis of climate change is confronted with large uncertainties that need to be taken into account to arrive at meaningful policy recommendations. The main contribution of economics to this interdisciplinary task is to provide formal frameworks and techniques for analyzing climate policy...

The upcoming European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is one of the more controversial climate policy instruments. Predictions about its likely impact and its performance can at present only be made to a certain degree. As long as the National Allocations Plans are not finally settled the overall...

The objective of this paper is to assess the likely allocation effects of the current climate protection strategy as it is laid out in the National Allocation Plans (NAPs) for the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The multi-regional, multi-sectoral CGE-model DART is used to simulate the...