On International Equity Weights and National Decision Making on Climate Change

By David Anthoff, Richard S. J. Tol. Social Science Research Network, 2010

205 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Estimates of the marginal damage costs of carbon dioxide emissions require the aggregation of monetised impacts of climate change over people with different incomes and in different jurisdictions. Implicitly or explicitly, such estimates assume a social welfare function and hence a particular attitude towards equity and justice. We show that previous approaches to equity weighting are inappropriate from a national decision maker's point of view, because domestic impacts are not valued at domestic values. We propose four alternatives (sovereignty, altruism, good neighbour, and compensation) with different views on concern for and liability towards foreigners. The four alternatives imply radically different estimates of the social cost of carbon and hence the optimal intensity of climate policy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43c6dcf19ccc84c101934ac551ffff942d031f97

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

The impact of climate change and the social cost of carbon (2018, background): “Finally, the social cost of carbon is defined as the global social cost of carbon, implicitly assuming a global social planner, a benevolent philosopher-queen; Anthoff and Tol (2010) explore national attitudes towards global welfare.”
Targets for global climate policy: an overview (2013, background): “Anthoff et al. (2009a) and Anthoff and Tol (2010b) explore equity weights in the context of a regional decision maker.”
The Marginal Damage Costs of Different Greenhouse Gases: An Application of FUND (2014, unknown): “For recent discussions on equity weights, see (Anthoff et al. 2009; Anthoff and Tol 2010; Rose 2012).”
Negishi welfare weights in integrated assessment models: the mathematics of global inequality (2011, background): “The FUND model includes equity weights, and its lead author has written extensively on the inclusion of such weights in IAMs (Kemfert and Tol 2002; Tol 2001) (Anthoff and Tol 2007). In addition to PAGE and FUND—both of which are well-known regionally disaggregated models—Azar (1999) and Baer and Tem”
The uncertainty about the social cost of carbon: A decomposition analysis using fund (2013, background): “We show estimates of the regional social cost of carbon, ignoring impacts in the other parts of the world (Anthoff and Tol 2010).”