Identifying Cost-Effective Environmental Policies That Address Distributional Concerns

一些减少污染的政策(包括典型的排污税和拍卖的可交易许可证)具有成本效益的吸引力，但将整个经济范围内的监管成本的很大一部分强加给受监管的公司，导致受监管行业的利润大量损失。其他政策(如祖传可交易许可证制度)设法避免将如此大的成本强加给受监管的公司，但要做到这一点，需要付出非常大的成本效益牺牲，即对整个经济的监管成本增加非常大。在不大幅增加总体经济成本的情况下，无法避免给关键行业带来巨大的经济负担，这严重阻碍了以激励为基础的政策和其他承诺提高效率的政策的广泛使用。该项目分析和评估了解决环境政策中重要的分配问题的效率成本。特别是，该项目研究了与污染政策的经济结果有特别大利害关系的“绝缘”生产商的成本，并探索了随着“绝缘网”变得更广泛以保护更广泛的行业利益相关者群体，效率成本如何变化。它审议了一系列可能的工具，目的是确定成本效益相对较高的污染控制政策，为关键利益攸关方提供合理程度的补偿或隔离，从而增强政治可行性的前景。将考虑的政策包括那些涉及超边际免征污染税的政策，部分取消污染许可，以及(对于下游公司)特定行业的企业减税或税收抵免。该研究使用解析解和数值一般均衡模型来描绘在何种情况下隔离关键行业的成本较低。它考虑了避免对污染燃料的“上游”供应商和大量使用此类燃料的“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，以便将其应用于其他污染物，如NO2和S02。第三部分--将与前两部分一起进行--涉及改进理论和数值模型的关键参数以及在数值模型的能量系统中引入重要的“自下而上”细节的经验工作。

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.