Technical change and the marginal cost of abatement：（技术变革和减排的边际成本）.pdfVIP

Technical Change and the Marginal Cost of Abatement∗ Erin Baker†and Ekundayo Shittu University of Massachusetts, Amherst Leon Clarke Joint Global Change Research Institute University of Maryland, Baltimore. June 14, 2006 ∗Running Head: Increased MAC †Correspondence Address: Erin Baker, 220 Elab, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003; email: edbaker@; 413-545-0670 1 Technical Change and the Marginal Cost of Abatement Abstract We address one aspect of the treatment of technical change in the environmental economics liter- ature: how technical change impacts the marginal cost of abatement. We review a selection of papers that employ a variety of representations of technical change, and show that these representations have quite different, and sometimes surprising, effects on the marginal costs of pollution reductions. We argue that these varied representations in fact correspond to a variety of different technology options. We then present results indicating that this representation matters — the impacts of technical change on the marginal cost of abatement can crucially impact policy analysis. JEL classifi cation: H21, D58, O33, C61. Keywords: CO2 abatement costs; Policy instruments; Carbon dioxide capture and storage; En- dogenous technical change. 2 1 Introduction Economic researchers have long been interested in the relationship between environmental policy and technical change. This interest has taken on a renewed vigor in recent years in response to increasing concerns about climate chang