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Assessment of Acceptable Swiss post-2012 Climate Policies

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 148, pages 347–380 (2012)Cite this article

Summary

In the framework of the revision of the Swiss CO2-Law and in the preparation of the international negotiations that place at the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Swiss Government has proposed a set of instruments and two levels of abatement to define the Swiss climate policy for the post-2012 period. By 2030, Switzerland would recuce its GHG emission by 30% or 45%, depending on whether or not the rest of the world world would commit to strong emissions reductions. The proposed policies are the result of consultation procedures take into account the views of major stakeholders and lobbies and allow for differienciated carbon prices in different sectors of the Swiss economy. Linking a Cumputable General Equilibrium (CGE) and two sectoral energy models, we evaluate the policies for the two scenarios. We find important disparities in the prices of carbon faced by the different economic sectors and higher welfare costs than those that would be triggered by a uniform carbon tax.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economics and Environmental Management Laboratory — Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    André Sceia & Marc Vielle

  2. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, Department of Economics, Research Group on Environment and Growth, Mexico City, Mexico

    Juan-Carlos Altamirano-Cabrera

  3. Energy Economics Group — Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), CH-5232, Villigen, Switzerland

    Nicolas Weidmann

Authors
  1. André Sceia
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  2. Juan-Carlos Altamirano-Cabrera
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  3. Marc Vielle
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  4. Nicolas Weidmann
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Correspondence to André Sceia.

Additional information

a This work has been undertaken with the support of NSF-NCCR climate and Federal Office for the Environment grants. We are very grateful to Martin Peter, Carten Nathani and the Federal Office of Statistics for providing us with disaggregated input-output tables. We also would like to thank Jacqueline Hug, Thorsten F. Schulz, Philippe Thalmann, Hal Turton as well as the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Remaining errors are under the sole responsibility of the authors.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Sceia, A., Altamirano-Cabrera, JC., Vielle, M. et al. Assessment of Acceptable Swiss post-2012 Climate Policies. Swiss J Economics Statistics 148, 347–380 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399370

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