Economic Instruments to Combat Climate Change in Asian countries

Asia, where most of the countries do not currently have emission reduction obligations, is an important region to address climate change issues because of its large GHG emissions. The total emissions of eight key Asian countries (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and India) represent 44% of the world emissions. Thus, regimes in these countries addressing climate change, if successful, would make significant progress towards climate mitigation.

Recently, economic instruments, particularly carbon tax and emissions trading scheme (ETS), have attracted the most attention to combat climate change because of their cost efficiency to reduce emissions.

This book presents the recent development of economic instruments in eight representative Asian countries. Each chapter shows the legal design of each economic instrument. Furthermore, the effect of the instruments, and the challenges to and improvement of the instruments are also described.

The preliminary finding of this book shows:

• The market mechanism is still preferred over the tax regime in addressing climate change in Asian countries. In spite of the emphasis of the role of tax in Europe and much literature, it seems the tax-wary countries in Asia remain sceptical towards a carbon tax.
• The ETS has been put into practice in Europe for a long time. Yet, in Asia, many of the economic instruments face substantial opposition from industry and citizens.
• The only exception is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The legal regime to respond to the need of CDM has been developed quickly and satisfactorily. Yet, such a positive attitude toward CDM does not equally apply to ETS.
• In spite of the discussion of legislative proposals in almost all the Asian countries, the final adopted form of ETS in the countries seems to be different from the forms of ETS adopted in other parts of the world: the ‘pilot’ ETS; ETS in the ‘local-government’ level; and the ‘voluntary’ approach.
• All of these aspects of specific ETS can show how different the approaches are among Asian countries in implementing the European style or UNFCCC concerned ETS in Asian regimes.

2015 is an influential moment/time for the important COP in Paris. The past lessons and experience of Asian countries of tax, ETS, and CDM could affect the fate of the talks and negotiations. This book wishes to provide the updated information on the situation of the economic instruments. Hopefully, the informative nature of this book could play some role in contributing to the background knowledge, and facilitate Euro-Asia talks on climate change issues.