Funding entity Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Participated by Universidad de Vigo, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de La Laguna, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Massachussets Institute of Technology
A new regulatory regime of greenhouse gas emissions, to replace the Kyoto Protocol, will be born in 2012. This project is interested, in a context of regulatory prospective and from an economic approximation, in several key issues for the definition, analysis and evaluation of Spanish climate change policies. In particular, the project will deal with the interactions and preferences of climate change instruments, the influence of climate change impacts in the conformation of policies, and the economic and distributional assessment of climate change policies in Spain. First of all, this project will offer a review of the economic literature on international environmental agreements. Although the major objective will be to yield a group of plausible post-2012 policy scenarios, during this phase some research gaps will be identified. In this sense, the project intends to yield advances in the field of game theory applied to climate negotiations between states and blocks. Nevertheless, the main output of this part will be the foundation and specification of simulations (in families of hypothetical scenarios) to be used in subsequent phases. The simulations will consider the main climate architectures under discussion and the existing (EU) regulatory scenarios. A second objective is related to the selection, application and preferences for different instruments that are part of climate change policies. As the problem has a considerable magnitude and extent, being caused by almost every agent, the instruments should be powerful and diverse (including environmental, energy or fiscal tools). However, an accumulation of instruments can be counterproductive in terms of effectiveness and economic efficiency. Therefore, the subproject will deal with the interactions amongst different instruments, both from positive and normative point of views. A third objective is to contemplate the role of inter-temporal preferences and discount rates, of preference assessment with respect to prevention and mitigation policies, as well as of other environmental impacts not previously studied, in the conformation of climate change policies and their modeling strategies. Finally, this project has as an objective the scenario-based study of the environmental, economic and distributional effects from the application of different policies of climate change in Spain. With that in mind, the project integrates different methodologies and data. As a central core, a dynamic applied general equilibrium model for Spain will provide the main macroeconomic effects, although other models will be used to solve the problems related to the scarce data given to some key sectors or agents. An integrated use of a microsimulation model to contemplate the reactions and distribution of regulatory burden across households, and a detailed model of the Spanish electricity system (origin of most of the emissions) will quantify the impacts in that sector. Thus the project intends to increase the knowledge of matters that have traditionally been overlooked in Spain (at least with respect to European standards). We believe that the project responds both to a clear academic interest (in a growing discipline in Economics) and to the need to provide rigorous answers to regulators and other social agents in a major socio-economic field.
Escenarios2012
