Cost And Welfare: A Simulation of Establishing A Unified Carbon Market In China

Background: Global warming has aroused wide concern of international community, which has reached a consensus on the carbon abatement. In 2017, China should have established a unified market for carbon emission trading, while the government has postponed the establishment because the uncertainty of cost calculation and welfare. Therefore, the cost and welfare of carbon abatement in simulated scenarios could help the government in establishing a unified carbon market and setting suitable policy. In the national carbon trading market, the variations of different abatement cost are the precondition of carbon exchange. This paper set forth theories related to carbon market and used parametric directional distance function model to derive the shadow prices of 30 provinces from 2011 to 2017. Then the classic logarithmic model is used to simulate marginal abatement cost curves, which is further applied to empirically investigate the welfare of 30 provinces in two scenarios of carbon trading market in China. ResultsThe results indicate that marginal abatement cost would rise with the increasing of emission reduction and vary significantly among provinces, and undeveloped provinces have greater potential in emission reduction than developed regions. Moreover, all provinces could benefit from the establishment of the nationwide ETS.ConclusionsThis article combines the theoretical model of shadow prices with the analysis of China’s carbon trading market in an attempt to analyze the cost and welfare of Chinese provinces and cities on the unified carbon trading market, adding the time trend factor to the directional distance function, and then further combines the parameter method to estimate the shadow price of CO 2 . Finally, the paper gives some proposals regarding to China’s ETS and carbon reduction targets.