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的可交易许可证）具有成本效益的吸引力，但却将整个经济的管制成本的很大一部分强加给受管制的公司，造成受管制行业利润的大量损失。其他政策（如可交易许可制度）设法避免对受监管的公司施加如此大的成本，但要做到这一点，就需要牺牲很大的成本效益，也就是说，整个经济的监管成本大大增加。由于无法避免在不显著增加总体经济成本的情况下给关键行业带来巨大的经济负担，因此严重阻碍了更广泛地使用基于奖励的政策和其他有望提高效率的政策。 该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，该项目审查了“隔离”生产商的成本，这些生产商在污染政策的经济成果中拥有特别大的利益，并探讨了效率成本如何随着“隔离网”的扩大而变化，以保护更广泛的工业利益相关者群体。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，为关键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。需要考虑的政策包括那些涉及超边际豁免污染税，部分祖父的污染许可证，和（在下游企业的情况下）特定行业的企业减税或taxcredits.The研究采用分析解决和数值一般均衡模型来描绘的情况下，绝缘的关键部门的成本是小的。它考虑了避免对污染燃料的“上游”供应商和大量使用这种燃料的“下游”公司造成严重影响的代价。该项目的第一个主要组成部分侧重于二氧化碳减排政策。第二部分概括了分析，使其可以应用于其他污染物，如NO2和SO2。第三个组成部分-与前两个组成部分同时进行-涉及经验工作，以改进理论和数值模型的关键参数，并在数值模型的能源系统中引入重要的“自下而上”的细节。

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.