题 目：Efficiency and Equity Impacts of Carbon Policies in China
主讲人：Valerie J. Karplus博士 （美国麻省理工学院）
时 间：2013年4月18日（星期四）上午 9:30
地 点：主楼六层会议室
主讲人简介：
Dr. Valerie J. Karplus is Director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project (CECP) and a research scientist in the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on energy and environmental policy design, with emphasis on the transportation sector. Together with a team of researchers at MIT and Tsinghua University, she is currently leading a research project on China's role in global energy markets and climate change mitigation. She holds degrees in engineering systems and civil engineering from MIT and biochemistry and political science from Yale University.
内容简介：
An important policy question in China is how to equity allocate the responsibility for reducing carbon emissions. China has already introduced provincial targets to achieve a national carbon intensity reduction of 17% in its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, and the design of a cap-and-trade system is currently under discussion. Using a computable general equilibrium model with energy system detail, we assess alternative criteria—production emissions, consumption emissions, or a shared production and consumption metric—for allocating CO2 intensity target responsibility across provinces, and compare them to the existing politically-negotiated targets. We further show how economic cost can be lowered and equity goals addressed by employing a permit trading mechanism and how equity goals can be achieved through the choice of index used to determine the initial allocation. Adjusting the provincial targets on a consumption basis increases the economic burden for the eastern provinces by about 60%, while alleviating the burden for the central and western provinces by about 50% each. This adjustment makes meeting policy targets more expensive—the CGE analysis indicates that this adjustment could double China's national welfare loss compared to the homogenous and politically-based distribution of reduction targets. The welfare losses for the eastern provinces increase by a factor of four, while providing little relief for the central and western provinces. A shared-responsibility approach that balances production-based and consumption-based emissions responsibilities alleviates those unbalancing effects and lead to a more equal distribution of economic burden among China's provinces. An emissions-trading system (ETS) that achieves the same reduction and applies various criteria to determine the initial allocation lowers the cost relative to all corresponding intensity target scenarios while still addressing equity concerns. Allocating emissions allowances based on a consumption-based approach results in a greater alleviation of regional welfare impacts and a more equal distribution of economic burden than the regional shared-responsibility scenario. This analysis argues in favor of developing a Chinese ETS and of scaling up efforts to measure, report, and verify emissions, which would in turn allow for a differentiated allocation of allowances similar to that analyzed in this study.