Burden Sharing Emissions and Climate Change: A Theoretic Welfare Approach

The approximated cost-benefit function of pollution abatement from two integrated assessment models are employed in constructing of social welfare functions (SWF). Following a normative approach and evaluating equally the environmental goods in rich and poor countries, furthermore using distributional weights, a relation between elasticity of marginal utility e and inequality aversion parameter γ is established. By maximizing the global social welfare, the optimal pollution abatement level are found. The relation between the income elasticity of marginal utility e and the inequality aversion parameter γ allow to narrow the variation of e for a particular value of γ. As a consequence, smaller variation for optimal abatement levels are obtained, which allows to inspect if the Kyoto abatement objectives respect the requirement of evaluating equally the environmental goods in rich and poor countries.