Papers by Nikolaos Vlassis
Climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen' Stern (2006 p. xvii).... more Climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen' Stern (2006 p. xvii). This vigorous description highlights one of the most important and frustrating realization of the last decades. The main reason of that market failure steams from the fact that climate change is a complex global externality. This makes the design of appropriate measures to mitigate the problem and the identification of their effects on economic activity of paramount importance. The transboundary nature of pollution combined with the skewed distribution of the origin and impact of emissions among countries reveals the need for international cooperation in the direction of multilateral agreements among countries. The characterization of Pareto-efficient environmental and trade policies has been a key issue (and continues to be) in the literature. Predominantly, however, the literature has focused on the role of taxes (trade and pollution) in achieving the first-best paying no attention to the role (if there is any) of nontradeable goods. Chapter 4 deals with this issue. A key issue in mitigating climate change is with the appropriate extent of harmonization of environmental policies. This thesis (Chapters 2) addresses this within a general equilibrium model of international trade with endogenous pollution discharges, paying particular attention to the allocation of tax revenues. It argues that there indeed exist instances in which pollution tax harmonization (that moves the initial pollution taxes towards an appropriately weighted pollution tax vector) can deliver potential Pareto improvements. The difficulty with the achievement of global environmental agreements should not be, however,
Multilateral Reforms of Trade and Environmental Policy of an Environmental Union
This paper analyses environmental and trade policy reforms undertaken by a subset of countries th... more This paper analyses environmental and trade policy reforms undertaken by a subset of countries that are bound by an environmental agreement (referred to as an environmental union). A perfectly competitive general equilibrium model of world trade is used that includes trade tari s, environmental taxes and international transfers to address trade and environmental distortions. The rst-best optimal trade and environmental policies for the union are derived in the presence and absence of transfers and we nd that the transfers internalise the negative externalities (trade and environmental) from the non-union countries. Thereafter, starting from an initial arbitrary tari and pollution distorted equilibrium, the necessary and su cient conditions for the existence of strict Pareto-improving reforms to be undertaken by the union are developed. Speci c reforms are characterised and applied to analyse the change in welfare of the union and non-union countries. We nd that, even in the presence...
The purpose of this paper is to extend the existing literature on the relationship between intern... more The purpose of this paper is to extend the existing literature on the relationship between international trade and climate change by introducing non-tradeable goods and examining their role in the characterization of the Pareto-e cient environmental and trade policies. It is argued that the presence of non-tradable goods does not impede the central planner from imposing the Pigovian carbon taxes.
Environmental and Resource Economics, 2012
A key, and often controversial, issue in environmental negotiations is the appropriate extent of ... more A key, and often controversial, issue in environmental negotiations is the appropriate extent of harmonization of the participating countries' environmental policies. This paper, within a general equilibrium model of international trade with endogenous pollution discharges, identi…es instances in which pollution-tax harmonization can deliver potential Pareto improvements.
Agricultural Economics Review, 2016
Accepted date 8 May 2017 but publication date 2016 - Greek journal - no open access information a... more Accepted date 8 May 2017 but publication date 2016 - Greek journal - no open access information available. Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was part of my PhD thesis conducted at the University of Exeter. I am grateful to the faculty of Economics, University of Exeter, for their support. Special thanks to Christos Kotsogiannis for introducing me to the issue of border tax adjustments and for his helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank Pascalis Raimondos Moller, Ben Zissimos and Michael Michael for their comments and suggestions as well as the participants in the ETSG 2013 and the Second Environmental Protection and Sustainability Forum: Towards Global Agreements on Environmental Protection and Sustainability 2015.
Environmental and Resource Economics, 2020
We analyse the welfare effects of environmental policy arising from the formation of an internati... more We analyse the welfare effects of environmental policy arising from the formation of an international environmental agreement on the participating and non-participating countries and thus shed light on the potential incentives for a country to join such an agreement. Within a N-country Q-goods general equilibrium framework under free-trade conditions, we consider unilateral and cooperative policy settings and, within the latter, country-specific and fully harmonized policies within the agreement. A key result of the paper is the emergence of a negative relationship, arising from terms of trade effects, between the welfare changes of the participating and non-participating countries following the formation of the agreement. These however do not result in a zero sum welfare outcome for the world as a whole.
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Papers by Nikolaos Vlassis