STRATEGIC EFFECTS OF A BORDER TAX ADJUSTMENT

Carbon leakage and competitiveness concerns are some of the main reasons why an international environmental agreement is lacking to fight climate change. Many studies discussed the adoption of a border tax adjustment (BTA) to allow countries that would like to implement a carbon tax to level the playing field with imports. The big drawback from these studies is that the other country is not allowed to react by adopting itself a carbon tax to avoid being punished with the BTA. The model proposed in this paper looks at the optimization of two different governments and their respective firms. Parametric values inside the set [0, 1) are used to represent the possible extents of the BTA depending on both countries environmental policy allowing countries to have different carbon policies. The result that a BTA parameter of 0.5 yields the highest total welfare could increase its acceptance within the World Trade Organization (WTO).