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Record W1271845084

The WTO Consistency of Carbon Footprint Taxes

2015· article· en· W1271845084 on OpenAlex
Carol McAusland, Nouri Najjar

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueGeorgetown journal of international law · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicClimate Change Policy and Economics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCarbon footprintCarbon taxEconomicsCarbon leakageGreenhouse gasConsumption (sociology)ExternalityInternational economicsConsumption taxInternational tradePublic economicsEmissions tradingMicroeconomicsTax reformAd valorem tax
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Absent meaningful multilateral action on greenhouse gas emissions, countries wishing to combat climate change must decide whether to take or continue unilateral action. A significant obstacle facing many governments is how to maintain the competitiveness of domestic industries and minimize the leakage of carbon emissions through international trade without violating trade rules. One way to assuage these competitiveness and leakage concerns is to implement destination-based carbon pricing—carbon policy levied at the point of consumption, rather than production. This Article addresses whether one such form of climate policy—a consumption tax levied on the carbon footprint of goods consumed domestically—would be consistent with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. Because a carbon footprint tax (CFT) would be levied at the point of consumption, goods would be treated equally regardless of whether they are imported or produced domestically. This Article analyzes the legal precedents for a footprint tax and identifies grounds upon which a CFT might possibly be challenged. Our assessment is that the most convincing challenge would be through the likeness criterion. Although the CFT would be a single-rate tax, the effective tax per-unit will vary across goods according to their carbon footprint. As a result, goods that are identical but for differences in their embodied emissions will face different tax burdens; if goods with different embodied carbon are deemed like goods, any variation in the per-unit tax could be interpreted as violating National Treatment. Recent precedents for treating goods as distinct because of consumer tastes and production externalities suggest that highand low-carbon goods may not be deemed like in the event of a challenge. Nevertheless, we also outline an alternate policy—one which pairs a uniform tax on goods with a consumption subsidy for low-carbon goods—that may survive challenge * Carol McAusland is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia, and the Canada Research Chair in Trade and Environment. © 2015, Carol McAusland. † Nouri Najjar is a Ph.D. student in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. Portions of this manuscript were originally circulated as part of a composite document titled “Carbon Footprint Taxes.” We are grateful to the following individuals for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this Article: Steve Charnovitz, Aaron Cosbey, David Duff, Jennifer Hillman, Gary Hufbauer, Itziar Lazkano, Gabrielle Marceau, Charles McLure, Stephanie Monjon, and Joost Pauwelyn. © 2015, Nouri Najjar.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.597
Threshold uncertainty score0.285

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.089
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.171 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it