International Environmental Agreements: Incentive Contracts with Multilateral Externalities

We consider how one party can induce another party to join an inter- national emission compact given private information. Due to multilateral externalities the principal uses her own emissions besides subsidies to in- centivize the agent. This leads to a number of non-standard features: Optimal contracts can include a boundary part, which is not a copy of the no contract outcome. Compared to this, a contract can increase emis- sions of the principal for ine¢ cient types, and reduce his payo¤ for e¢ cient types. Subsidies can be constant or even decreasing and turn negative, i.e., the agent reduces emissions and pays the principal.private information, multilateral externalities, mecha- nism design, restricted contracts, environmental agreements

China’s foreign oil policy: genesis, deployment and selected effects

China is a rising global power with a growing role and impact on the world’s energy markets as well as on the Earth’s climate system. China pursues its development in an essentially non-confrontational manner, a vision encapsulated by the notion of peaceful rise which is viewed positively in the world’s major capitals. Nevertheless, China’s rapid growth represents a genuine global challenge and raises many questions. How is China dealing with its growing need for imported crude oil? What is the impact of China’s rise on the global oil market, notably in terms of oil price developments? Are Chinese actions on oil markets different from those of other major importers? What opportunities and risks arise as a result of china’s growing role on the global oil market from the viewpoint of other global players? In this report we seek to offer some answers to those questions with a review of China’s developing energy policy, of the actions and revealed preferences of its national oil companies, and of broader economic and geopolitical analyses of the impact of China’s growing oil consumption on other global players.Crude oil, energy security, oil security, China, foreign oil policy

OPEC as a political and economical entity

This paper assumes that the decision makers of OPEC (or at least of its core members) are interested in both profits and political payoffs (support, popularity, being a hero of the Arab or Islamic street, etc.). The oil weapon, i.e. a reduction of output is the most powerful instrument to obtain political payoffs from harming the West, which can be also profitable in the short run due to the high prices implied by sluggish demand for OPEC oil. The analysis shows that this political objective reduces longrun supply and includes the possibility that it is optimal to 'kill the goose that lays the golden eggs' if initial demand is below a threshold (and multiple steady states exist).OPEC Political objectives Dynamic demand Thresholds

The exploitation of fossil fuels under the threat of global warming and carbon taxes: A dynamic game approach

This paper considers efficient and monopolistic extraction of non-renewable (energy) resources when the resource consumption leads simultaneously to a stock externality (‘global warming’). The case of monopolistic supply leads to a dynamic game between cartelised producers and a consumers' government. For this game, we compute linear Markov perfect strategies that are characterized by preemption of the tax at the wellhead (when compared with the open loop solution). Unfortunately, the general, asymmetric two-state variable model does not allow for an explicit analytical solution. Therefore, a simplified version with one state variable (neglecting depreciation of the stock of the pollutant) is studied and a numerical example is presented. It turns out that the simplified and analytically solved framework provides a good approximation of the initial phase of the transient behaviour but not of the long run. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1995