After the political agreement at the Bonn climate talks, the Kyoto Protocol is now ready for ratification. Key policy questions surrounding the ultimate implementation of the Kyoto Protocol and any follow-up international agreement on climate protection require quantitative assessment, i.e. the use of analytical models that mimic the potential economic impacts of alternative emission reduction ...

Ten years after the initial Climate Change Convention from Rio in 1992, the developed world is likely to ratify the Kyoto Protocol which has been celebrated as a milestone in climate protection. Standard economic theory, however, casts doubt that Kyoto will go beyond symbolic policy. In this paper we show that the final concretion of the Kyoto Protocol obeys the theoretical prediction: Kyoto mo...