Three essays in environmental economics

This thesis is composed of three chapters which concern the problem of the optimal regulation of carbon emissions to mitigate climate change.  In the first chapter, we analyze strategic interactions between a resource cartel exporting a non-renewable stock pollutant and two heterogeneous importing countries, who want to mitigate pollution damages. The importing countries differ with respect to market size and with respect to how strongly they are affected by the (global) stock of pollution. The importing countries non cooperatively set emissions taxes and the exporting cartel sets its producer price. Using open loop Nash equilibrium, we obtain explicit solutions for the time paths of the carbon taxes, the producer price and the stock of pollution. We show that when the countries act non cooperatively, at a finite time, the producer price jumps and the country that is most affected by pollution stops demanding the resource. Our numerical results based on the explicit characterization of the non-cooperative equilibrium yield that more symmetry with respect to the cost of pollution leads to faster increase of the stock of pollution initially, but to a lower long-term stock and higher total discounted welfare.  In the second chapter, we analyzes the effects of bilateral border tax adjustments on carbon taxes in a non-cooperative game between two symmetric open countries trading in an oligopolistic framework with cross-border pollution. We also contrast the results of this BTA game with those of two benchmarks (the non-cooperative game without BTA and the efficient solution). We note that when countries suffer little from pollution, only symmetric equilibria exist. By contrast, if countries suffer sufficiently from pollution, only asymmetric equilibria exist. Carbon taxes in symmetric equilibria are higher than the efficient taxes, while the opposite is true for the asymmetric equilibria. In all cases of interest, the total welfare in the equilibrium of the non cooperative game with BTA is higher than that in the equilibrium of the non cooperative game without BTA. If the cost of pollution is sufficiently low, there is a level of BTA such that non cooperative equilibrium taxes are efficient. Finally, in the case where the countries suffer a lot from pollution, the optimal level of BTA can be partial or full depending on the parameters of the model.  Finally, in the last chapter, we study a non-cooperative transboundary pollution game between respectively two countries and three countries setting carbon taxes in the presence of a Border Tax Adjustment (BTA) and with imperfect competition in the international polluting goods market. Countries are asymmetric with respect to their willingness to pay for reductions of global emissions. In our models, only the most affected country imposes a BTA. We show that, unlike in the existing literature using two-country models with only one market, the most affected country generally prefers using a full BTA, a tariff that fully adjusts for the differences between its own carbon tax and those in other countries, to a partial BTA. Moreover, a full BTA is optimal for the global welfare in most cases of interest.

Keyphrases: Transboundary pollution, Carbon taxes, Non-renewable resources, Game theory, Carbon leakage, Competitiveness, Border tax adjustment