0000000000736069
AUTHOR
Alistair Ulph
An infinite-horizon model of dynamic membership of international environmental agreements
Abstract Much of the literature on international environmental agreements (IEAs) uses static models, although most important transboundary pollution problems involve stock pollutants. The few papers that study IEAs using models of stock pollutants do not allow for the possibility that membership of the IEA may change endogenously over time. In this paper we analyse a simple infinite-horizon version of the static model of self-enforcing IEAs, in which damage costs increase with the stock of pollution, and countries decide each period whether to join an IEA. Using a quadratic approximation of the value function of the representative country we show that there exists a steady-state stock of po…
Self-enforcing international environmental agreements revisited
In Barrett's (1994) paper on transboundary pollution abatement is shown that if the signatories of an international environmental agreement act in a Stackelberg fashion, then, depending on parameter values, a self-enforcing IEA can have any number of signatories between two and the grand coalition. Barrett obtains this result using numerical simulations and also ignoring the fact that emissions must be non-negative. Recent attempts to use analytical approaches and to explicitly recognize the non-negativity constraints have suggested that the number of signatories of a stable IEA may be very small. The way such papers have dealt with non-negativity constraints is to restrict parameter values…