اقتصاد سیاست های زیست محیطی در ترکیه: بررسی تعادل عمومی از ارزیابی اقتصادی از سیاست های کاهش انتشار بخشی برای تغییرات آب و هوایی

Research on climate change has intensified on a global scale as evidence on the costs of global warming continues to accumulate. Confronted with such evidence, the European Union set in late 2006 an ambitious target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, by 2020, to 20% below the level of 1990; and invited the rest of the developed economies and the developing world to take part with the Kyoto Protocol. Turkey is the only country that appears in the Annex-I list of the United Nations’ Rio Summit and yet an official target for CO2 emission reductions has still not been established. Thus, as part of its accession negotiations with the EU, Turkey will likely to face significant pressures to introduce its national plan on climate change along with specific emission targets and the associated abatement policies. Given this motivation, we utilize a computable general equilibrium model for Turkey to study the economic impacts of the intended policy scenarios of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol and we report on the general equilibrium effects of various possible environmental abatement policies in Turkey over the period 2006–2020. The model is in the Walrasian tradition with 10 production sectors and a government operating within an open macroeconomy environment. It accommodates flexible production functions, imperfect substitution in trade and open unemployment. We focus on CO2 emissions and distinguish various basic sources of gaseous pollution in the model. Our results suggest that the burden of imposing emission control targets and the implied abatement costs could be quite high, and that there is a need to finance the expanded abatement investments from scarce domestic resources. Policies for environmental abatement via carbon and/or increased energy taxes further suffer from very adverse employment effects. This suggests that a first-best policy would necessarily call for a simultaneous reduction on the existing tax burden on producers elsewhere together with introduction of environmental taxes.

In this paper, we utilize a computable general equilibrium model for Turkey to study the economic impacts of the intended policy scenarios of compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Turkey is the only country that appears in the Annex-I list of the Rio Summit and yet an official target for CO2 emission reductions has still not been established. Thus, as part of its accession negotiations with the EU, it will likely to face significant pressures to introduce its national plan on climate change along with specific emission targets and the associated abatement policies. Given this motivation, we report on the general equilibrium effects of various possible environmental abatement policies in Turkey over the period 2006–2020. Several policy conclusions emerge from our analysis: • Our modeling results suggest that the burden of possible imposition of direct carbon emission quotas would be quite high. This burden will necessitate a significant tax imposition on the producers to enforce the CO2 quotas. According to our results, imposition of CO2 quota at 60% level to the base-run calls for a carbon tax of 20–15% over 2006–2020. The GDP loss incurred under this scenario is above 30% as of 2020. • Such a tax burden will likely lead to tax evasion practices, and will encourage the underground (informal) economy. Thus, it will likely lead to increased informalization of the production activities. The already high levels of producer tax incidences reduce the effectiveness of additional carbon taxation opportunities significantly. • In contrast to a direct “CO2 quota-cum-carbon tax” policy, taxation of energy use in sectoral production seems to produce viable results. In returns to a 20% energy tax for producers, aggregate CO2 emissions are reduced by 25.8% with a loss of GDP of 8.8% by the end of 2020. The energy taxation policy suffers strongly, however, from its very adverse employment effects. Unemployment rates rise significantly as a result of the introduced energy taxes. With limited substitution possibilities in input mix among labor and energy inputs, producers are bound to cut back labor employment as they are faced with increased energy costs. • The taxation policies suggest very clearly that possible interventions of new environmental taxes would have adverse outcomes either on employment or on sectoral output levels directly. A more effective policy would necessarily call for a simultaneous reduction on the existing tax burden on producers elsewhere together with introduction of environmental taxes. A reduction of employment taxes can be implemented along with the imposition of energy tax use. Such a policy would be conducive in attaining CO2 abatement targets together with employment incentives. Various studies show that using such tax revenues to finance reductions in the already existing (and mostly distortionary) taxes on employment, production, or sales can achieve superior outcomes with attaining environmental targets at lower cost—perhaps even at a positive net gain (see for example, Goulder, Parry, Williams, & Burtraw, 1999; Parry & Oates, 2000; Parry, Williams, & Goulder, 1999). • Overall, however, a first-best environmental policy has to call for further incentives towards reducing energy intensities in production through more efficient production methods. By itself this is no easy task and certainly comes at significant investment cost. Modeling results suggest that leaving the burden of the abatement investments to production sectors alone create significantly adverse results in terms of overall economic performance. According to our results, abatement investments that amount to 1.5% of GDP annually call for 23% tax rate on energy (primary and secondary) input usage. • Further indirect taxes on the production sectors would likely trigger unfavorable dynamics in production and employment. Parallel to the reduction in output, one observes adverse outcomes on already high unemployment rates of the economy. • The advantageous environment likely to be produced by foreign aid on abatement investments displays high economic growth attained together with reductions in CO2 emissions. An annual flow of foreign aid/credit of 1.5% as a ratio to the GDP designed to cover the costs of abatement investments for adoption of the “best available technologies” help reduce Turkish CO2 emissions by 4.9% in 2020 and by a cumulative of 199.1 million tonnes over the whole analyzed period. By way of a caveat, it should be clear that designing such an international aid/credit system for the developing countries in their efforts towards abatement investments is by no means an easy task, and one should be aware that international coordination and cooperation, although crucial, could be difficult to achieve. The Protocol, as an international attempt itself, has been criticized for defining mechanisms that are too bureaucratic and cumbersome. Aldy, Barett, and Stavins (2003), for instance, point out to ambiguities in the existing institutional framework at the global scale, and identify more than a dozen competing approaches with regard to international carbon taxation and international technology standards. • A second caveat concerns the boundaries of our modeling paradigm. The CGE model is a technical laboratory device where the adjustment path as characterized by the simulation exercises reflects a “well-defined” and “smooth” general equilibrium system, based on consumer and producer optimization in the absence of any rigidities and/or structural bottlenecks. Thus, the adjustments of the model economy in response to various policy shocks should not be taken as a measure of the global stability properties of the real economy, but rather as a direct outcome of the laboratory characteristics of a set of macroeconomic simulations. For these reasons, our results should at best be regarded as approximations of the long-run equilibrium effects of environmental and investment policies on production, employment, current account, capital accumulation and consumer welfare. • Finally, it should be noted that the model fails to identify the welfare benefits and possible productivity gains from reduced CO2 emissions. Reductions in gaseous pollutants, for instance, are likely to lead to improved health conditions, enabling increases in labor productivity. Likewise, reductions in gaseous emissions would likely lead to further productivity gains in, say agriculture and food availability, due to improved climatic conditions. In the absence of detailed cost–benefit analysis of reducing CO2 emissions on a microlevel, we had to abstain from making ad hoc assumptions on such favorable external incidence of abatement investments.