研討日期

2003年12月6日上午10:00 ~ 12:00

研討地點

台大社會科學院第二教室

討論文獻

題目

作者

文獻出處

 Strategic Environmental Policies When Waste Products are Tradable

James Cassing and Thomas Kuhn

Review of International Economics, 11(3), 495-511, 2003

報告人

蔡宗秀

參加人員

黃鴻、郭虹瑩、陳更生、許淑英、梁文榮、陳秀華、蔡爵丞、郭子綾、蔡宗秀

討論提要

1.      The purpose of this paper: by assuming the international hazardous waste market is an oligopoly market structure, this paper studies the strategic behavior of waste-exported and waste-imported countries’ decisions on environmental taxes.

2.      Model: the authors built an m+1 countries model.  Waste is assumed exported by n identical firms in home country (developing country).  There are m waste-importing countries.  The price of the waste is a function of the volume of total exported-waste, the home country environmental tax, and all foreign countries’ environmental taxes. 

3.      Three scenarios: based on the model set-up, this paper derives the governments’ strategic behavior based on (1) pure environmental policy—the governments do not take into account the terms of trade in their environmental tax decisions; (2) Nash Equilibrium—the two governments play Nash game in deciding each country’s environmental tax; (3) Stackelberg leadership—the home country decides its environmental tax first.

Results: (1) pure environmental policy— optimal environmental tax should equal to each country’s environmental marginal damage. (2) Nash equilibrium—the home country’s optimal   environmental tax is less than its marginal damage while the foreign countries environmental taxes are higher than their marginal damage. (3) Stackelberg leadership—the home country optimal environmental tax is even less than the tax rate on Nash equilibrium. 

延伸研究

The contribution of this paper is on its model; it is the first that formally models the international waste market.  Based on his model, I am going to expand the model so that the reality and the theoretical discussion can be matched closely.  These include: (1) assuming the home country also disposal the waste; waste disposal is also a competitive market; (2) foreign country recycles the waste and produces an recycled product; its social welfare includes recycled product market’s consumer surplus, producer surplus and waste importing tariff.        

備註

 This paper makes a huge mistake.  The sign of dE/dt is positive—the appendix of the paper points it out correctly--however, the content of the paper treats it as negative.  This affects the analysis of the whole paper.  We wonder the main results of this paper are  actually opposite.