Frank Vöhringer

Reinforcing the EU Dialogue with Developing Countries on Climate Change Mitigation

The FP6 TOCSIN project has evaluated climate change mitigation options in China and India and the conditions for strategic cooperation on research, development and demonstration (RDD (II) a strong increase in Annex I support regarding RD (III) a well-designed mix of instruments and targets in an effective climate deal that addresses manifold national interests and concerns.

Linking the Swiss Emissions Trading System with the EU ETS: Economic Effects of Regulatory Design Alternatives

SummaryThe Swiss government intends to link the Swiss Emissions Trading System to the EU ETS after 2012. Employing GENESwIS, a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Swiss economy, we investigate the macroeconomic and sectoral effects of a post-2012 Swiss ETS with linking to the EU ETS. It is the first such CGE analysis for Switzerland with disaggregated sectors according to magnitude of CO2 emissions from installations, which allows distinguishing ETS installations from non-ETS installations in the same sector. The reference scenario represents the announced post-2012 Swiss climate policy without ETS, implying a GHG emissions target for 2020 of −20% with respect to 1990. In the ETS policy scenarios, regulatory issues include participation thresholds and the share of auctioned permits. We show that the Swiss ETS reduction targets are not ambitious when declining baseline emissions are assumed. Thus, most ETS installations profit from an ETS, while non-ETS sectors have to reduce more emissions (and pay a higher CO2 tax). In the context of the simulated Swiss ETS scenarios, we find that distributional consequences of regulatory choices are far more important than efficiency considerations.

Trade and Climate Policies: Do Emissions from International Transport Matter?

This paper provides orders of magnitude of the importance of CO2 emissions from international freight transport activities under a variety of scenarios regarding trade and climate policies. It is based on a stylised multiregion, multisector CGE model that includes the four modes of international transport (air, water, road and rail) and where choices regarding the energy mix and transport modes have been endogeneised. A separate decomposition of emission changes into the well‐known scale, composition and technique effects is provided. Scale effects turn out to be roughly double in international transport than in exports, while technique effects are weaker due to less substitutability between energy inputs. As a result, international transport represents half of the world increase in global emissions when trade liberalisation is considered in isolation. When trade liberalisation is coupled with a carbon tax limited to rich countries, the change in international transport emissions represents roughly one‐eighth of the carbon leakage effect.