Globalized economy and national policies: Issues in comparing carbon emissions mitigation efforts under demographic and institutional asymmetry
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PhD Seminar (Econ)
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The success of the Paris Agreement (2015) in achieving its main temperature goal depends on its ability to increase the ambitions of individual countries to reduce their carbon emissions through effort comparison and peer pressure. Despite the empirical relevance of demographic changes in affecting factor prices, economic growth, and capital flows across countries, most comparisons of countries’ carbon emissions reduction efforts are based on models that cannot capture demographic effects. Overlooking demographic changes is problematic given the profound yet asymmetric demographic changes that countries are undergoing. This paper uses a two-country life-cycle model to show that comparing carbon emissions mitigation efforts can be misleading if countries’ baseline emissions trajectories do not account for demographic dividends and spillovers from one country to another from unsynchronized demographic changes and asymmetric institutions. Through capital flows, differences in the timing, speed, and magnitude of demographic changes, amplified with differences in institutions, can reduce the emissions baseline in one country while increasing it in the other country relative to a baseline with no spillovers. Models that do not consider the effect of demographic changes and the institutions on the economy and emissions may underestimate one country’s carbon emissions reduction effort while overestimating another’s. Consequently, neglecting demographic changes when comparing countries’ carbon emissions mitigation efforts can undermine the successful implementation of the Paris Agreement.
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