‘The economic effects of a worldwide tax on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions’
with
WTO Chief Economist, Ralph Ossa
Friday, 16 June 2023 | 10:00 to 11:15 hours (CEST)

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This special event will take place on Thursday, 16 June 2023 at 10:00 CEST (Rome time) in the King Faisal Room at FAO headquarters and virtually on the Zoom conferencing platform.

Climate change is a truly global environmental externality. Its impacts are indivisibly spread around the world; it affects many economic activities; its costs are not accounted for by markets; and, the benefits from mitigating its impact cannot be divided and claimed by any one country. Carbon taxes, by taking the social costs of climate change into account, can provide incentives for reducing emissions, with global trade helping to combat climate change. 

This presentation analyzes the economic effects of optimal climate action induced by a worldwide tax on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The analysis is conducted in the context of a state-of-the-art quantitative trade model, which applies numbers to the idea of “sustainable globalization”. The authors of the analysis find that (i) a global carbon tax is remarkably efficient, (ii) a global carbon tax exacerbates between-country inequality, (iii) a global carbon tax has almost no effect on the trade-to-GDP-ratio, and (iv) international trade initially became browner and then greener over the 1995-2018 time period.

Ralph Ossa is the Chief Economist and Director of the Economic Research and Statistics Division at the World Trade Organization. He is currently on leave from the University of Zurich, where he holds the Kühne Foundation Professorship of International Trade. His research focuses on the economics of trade negotiations and the gains from trade. He has published his research in Journals such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy.

The Seminar will be held in English.

Provisional Agenda

10:00 – 10:05	Opening of the event	Boubaker Ben-Belhassen, Director, Markets and Trade Division, FAO
10:05 – 10:30	Technical presentation	Ralph Ossa, Chief Economist, World Trade Organization (WTO)
10:30 – 11:00	Open interactive discussion	Q&A session
11:00	Conclusions and wrap-up	Boubaker Ben-Belhassen, Director, Markets and Trade Division, FAO

For further information, please contact: Markets-Trade@fao.org