INTERNATIONAL INEQUITY AVERSION AND THE SOCIAL COST OF CARBON

2010 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 21-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD S. J. TOL

I define the rate of inequity aversion, distinguishing between the pure rate and the consumption rate. I measure the rate of aversion to inequality in consumption as expressed in the development aid given by rich countries to poor ones between 1965 and 2005. There is an ambiguous relationship between the pure rate of inequity aversion and the consumption rate, driven by the rate of risk aversion. However, for a reasonable choice of the rate of risk aversion, rich countries are shown to be inequity averse, and increasingly so over time. The social cost of carbon is very sensitive to equity weighting and assumptions about the rate of risk and inequity aversion. Estimates of the consumption rate of inequity aversion for recent data suggest that the equity-weighted social cost of carbon is less than 50% larger than the unweighted estimate.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Tol

Abstract Some claim that as knowledge about climate change accumulates, the social cost of carbon increases. A meta-analysis of published estimates shows that this is not the case. Correcting for inflation and emission year and controlling for the discount rate, kernel density decomposition reveals a stationary distribution. Actual carbon prices are almost everywhere below the estimated social cost of carbon.


2014 ◽  
Vol 104 (5) ◽  
pp. 544-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin L. Weitzman

At high enough greenhouse gas concentrations, climate change might conceivably cause catastrophic damages with small but non-negligible probabilities. If the bad tail of climate damages is sufficiently fat, and if the coefficient of relative risk aversion is greater than one, the catastrophe-reducing insurance aspect of mitigation investments could in theory have a strong influence on raising the social cost of carbon. In this paper I exposit the influence of fat tails on climate change economics in a simple stark formulation focused on the social cost of carbon. I then attempt to place the basic underlying issues within a balanced perspective.


2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 024002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Anthoff ◽  
Richard S J Tol ◽  
Gary W Yohe

Author(s):  
Christoph Hambel ◽  
Holger Kraft ◽  
Eduardo Schwartz

Author(s):  
Elisabeth J. Moyer ◽  
Mark D. Woolley ◽  
Michael Glotter ◽  
David A. Weisbach

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Benjamin Zycher

Benefit/cost analysis can be a powerful tool for examination of proposed (or alternative) public policies, but, unsurprisingly, decisionmakers’ policy preferences can drive the analysis, rather than the reverse. That is the reality with respect to the Obama Administration computation of the social cost of carbon, a crucial parameter underlying the quantitative analysis of its proposed climate policies, now being reversed in substantial part by the Trump Administration. The Obama analysis of the social cost of carbon suffered from four central problems: the use of global benefits in the benefit/cost calculation, the failure to apply a 7% discount rate as required by Office of Management and Budget guidelines, the conflation of climate and GDP effects of climate policies, and the inclusion of non-climate effects of climate policies as co-benefits, as a tool with which to overcome the trivial temperature and other climate impacts of those policies. Moreover, the Obama analysis included in its “market failure” analysis the fuel price parameter that market forces are likely to incorporate fully. This Article suggests that policymakers and other interested parties would be wise to concentrate on the analytic minutia underlying policy proposals because policy analysis cannot be separated from politics.


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