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N° 120 |
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| Issue 4 2009 |
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Clean Technology Transfers and North-South Technological Gap:
an Important Issue for Environmental Policies |
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Patrick Schembri
Olivier Petit |
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| This paper aims at discussing the main stakes of clean technology transfer between the North and the South in a context of economic globalization and climate change. We present a model of environmental taxation between two asymmetric countries, the North and the South. It shows that (i) there exists a technological gap between the North and the South which results from an imperfect absorptive capability of the South ; (ii) this absorptive capability defines the rate of innovation in clean technologies for the South ; (iii) this technological gap contributes to explain why the South pollutes more than the North in a non-cooperative game in which the environmental tax rates determine the location of the firms ; (iv) cooperation is possible only if a financial transfer between the North and the South can be set. This financial transfer is a measure of the cost of this so-called Win-Win strategy according to which more outward-oriented policies would improve the environmental quality and increase the revenues of developing countries. |
Abstract
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| Clean technology transfer; global warming; clean development mechanism; north-south trade; the “Pollution haven” hypothesis |
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