Shiva Sikdar

Strategic Environmental Policy under Free Trade with Transboundary Pollution

We analyze the effects of trade liberalization on environmental policies in a strategic setting when there is transboundary pollution. Trade liberalization can result in a race to the bottom in environmental taxes, which makes both countries worse off. This is not due to the terms of trade motive, but rather the incentive, in a strategic setting, to reduce the incidence of transboundary pollution. With command and control policies (emission quotas), countries are unable to influence foreign emissions by strategic choice of domestic policy; hence, there is no race to the bottom. However, with internationally tradable quotas, unless pollution is a pure global public bad, there is a race to the bottom in environmental policy. Under free trade, internationally nontradable quotas result in the lowest pollution level and strictly welfare-dominate taxes. The ordering of internationally tradable quotas and pollution taxes depends, among other things, on the degree of international pollution spillovers.

Carbon leakage: the role of sequential policy setting

We analyze non-cooperative environmental policy when the only strategic interaction between countries is through bilateral transboundary pollution, i.e., countries are closed or small open economies. When countries set pollution taxes simultaneously, there is no carbon leakage. However, in the sequential-move game, the leader sets its pollution tax lower than the marginal damage from own pollution and lower than that in the simultaneous-move game, while the follower sets its tax higher than that in the simultaneous-move game. The only motive behind the leaders underregulation of own pollution is to reduce the incidence of transboundary pollution from the follower, i.e., to reduce carbon leakage. Aggregate pollution is higher in the sequential-move game than in the simultaneous-move game if pollution is a pure global public bad.