Sorry for cross-postings.
You may be interested in the working paper-Wang, H. and J. Firestone, The Analysis of Country-to-Country CDM Permit Trading using the Gravity Model in International Trade,-which is now available for download at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1428437, Comments on the paper are most welcome. An abstract follows. Cheers, Jeremy Abstract: The quality of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is an increasing concern for international community to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions, especially when international community is working towards another GHG reduction agreement. Among other reasons, the CDM has been complained that it favors some particular countries and that the imbalance in the distribution of the CDM has harmed the original purpose of this institutional arrangement. In this paper, we evaluated the current CDM projects based on econometric models in international trade theory and concluded that while the CDM was suffering from such imbalance, the primary determinant of the CDM replied on the total GHG emissions from host and credit countries. They were positively and consistently related to the CDM projects. The degree of openness, infrastructure and colony were important if all CDM projects were considered, but not significant when only accepted projects were included. We calculated that if the degree of openness and the infrastructure increased from 25 percentage to 75 percentage, the host country could attract 73% and 4% more CDM respectively. Our paper showed that the CDM projects distribution did not just imbalance towards some big countries, but a response to current environmental, economic and domestic policy situations. We then discussed these results in the context of policy-based action that might limit or otherwise affect the CDM implementation after the Copenhagen. Jeremy Firestone Associate Professor, College of Marine and Earth Studies Senior Research Scientist, Center for Carbon-free Power Integration University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 USA 1-302 831-0028 (office) 1-302 831-6838 (fax) j...@udel.edu www.ocean.udel.edu/windpower carbonfree.udel.edu http://www.ocean.udel.edu/people/jf
