Intra-country distributional impact of policies to fight Climate Change: A survey

In this paper we present a survey of distributional impact analysis of environmental policies envisaged or implemented to reduce greenhouse gaz emissions. The implementation of these policies usually aim at reducing greenhouse gases directly or indirectly. However, these policies can also produce important changes in factor allocation, relative prices in specific countries as well as on world markets when these policies are adopted by a large number of countries. The changes in welfare can be important for vulnerable groups of population in developing countries. This survey reviews the evidence on the incidence of these policies. In the process, it shows that the computable general equilibrium (CGE) microsimulation approach has not been fully exploited in the context of distributional impact analysis of CC policies.. Keyword: Global warming, environmental policies, income distribution, developing countries. J E L : D58, D60, H23, O13, Q52 ∗ GREDI, Department of Economics, Faculté d’Administration, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke Canada ι European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics, Université Libre de Bruxelles. ∗∗ Corresponding author, GREDI, Department of economics, Faculté d’administration, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke Canada ([email protected]) 2