Identifying Cost-Effective Environmental Policies That Address Distributional Concerns

一些减少污染的政策（包括典型的污染税和拍卖可交易许可证）具有成本效益的吸引力，但对受管制的公司施加了很大一部分经济范围内的管制成本，造成受管制行业的大量利润损失。其他政策（如祖父可交易许可制度）设法避免对受监管的公司施加如此巨大的成本，但要做到这一点，就需要牺牲成本效益，也就是说，对整个经济来说，监管成本会大幅增加。由于无法在不显著增加总经济成本的情况下避免给关键工业造成巨大的经济负担，这严重妨碍了更广泛地采用以奖励为基础的政策和其他有望提高效率的政策。本项目分析和评估解决环境政策中重大分配问题的效率成本。特别是，该项目考察了在污染政策的经济结果中具有特别大利害关系的“绝缘”生产商的成本，并探讨了随着“绝缘网”的扩大以保护更广泛的工业利益相关者群体，效率成本如何变化。它考虑了广泛的潜在手段，目的是确定相对具有成本效益的污染控制政策，向主要利益攸关方提供合理程度的补偿或隔离，从而提高政治可行性的前景。要考虑的政策包括那些涉及污染税的超边际豁免、污染许可证的部分祖父性规定，以及（在下游公司的情况下）特定行业的公司减税或税收抵免的政策。本研究采用解析解一般平衡模型和数值一般平衡模型来描述关键扇区保温成本较小的情况。它考虑了避免对污染燃料的“上游”供应商和集中利用这些燃料的“下游”公司造成严重影响的成本。该项目的第一个主要组成部分侧重于二氧化碳减排政策。第二部分对分析进行了概括，使其可以应用于其他污染物，如NO2和S02。第三部分——与前两个部分同时进行——涉及实证工作，以改进理论和数值模型的关键参数，并将重要的“自下而上”细节引入数值模型的能量系统。

Some pollution-abatement policies (including typical pollution taxes and auctioned tradeable permits) have the attraction of cost-effectiveness but impose a very large share of the economy-wide cost of regulation on the regulated firms, causing substantial losses of profit in the regulated industries. Other policies (such as systems of grandfathered tradeable permits) manage to avoid imposing such large costs on the regulated firms, but accomplishing this involves a very large sacrifice of cost-effectiveness, that is, a very large increase in the regulatory cost to the economy as a whole. The inability to avoid placing a large economic burden on key industries without significantly increasing the overall economic cost has seriously hampered the broader use of incentive-based and other policies that promise efficiency improvements. This project analyzes and evaluates the efficiency costs of addressing significant distributional concerns in environmental policy. In particular, the project examines the cost of "insulating" producers that have an especially large stake in the economic outcomes of pollution policy, and explores how efficiency costs change as the "insulation net" becomes broader to protect a wider group of industrial stakeholders. It considers a wide range of potential instruments with the aim of identifying relatively cost-effective pollution-control policies that provide a reasonable degree of compensation or insulation to key stakeholders - thus enhancing the prospects for political feasibility. Policies to be considered include those involving inframarginal exemptions to pollution taxes, partial grandfathering of pollution permits, and (in the case of downstream firms) industry-specific corporate tax cuts or tax credits.The research employs both analytically solved and numerical general equilibrium models to delineate the circumstances under which the cost of insulating key sectors is small. It considers the costs of avoiding serious impacts both on "upstream" suppliers of polluting fuels and on "downstream" firms that utilize such fuels intensively. The first major component of the project focuses on C02-abatement policies. The second component generalizes the analysis so that it can be applied to other pollutants such as NO2 and S02. The third component - to be performed in tandem with the first two - involves empirical work to improve key parameters of the theoretical and numerical models and to introduce important "bottom-up" details into the energy system of the numerical model.