Economic Theoretical and Quantitative Analysis on Effectiveness of Voluntary Agreements: A China Case Study

摘要

Voluntary Agreements is a newly developed non-mandatory environmental policy instrument in western countries in 1990s. Experiences of western countries proved that Voluntary Agreements is quite effective in promoting energy efficiency improvement, energy consumption structure optimization, and abatement of pollutions generated from energy use. In order to resolve the problems of both low utilization efficiencies in industries and serious environmental problems resulted from energy consumption, Chinese government is preparing to implement Voluntary Agreements in China' s industrial system. In this paper, firstly, the theoretical basis of effectiveness of Voluntary agreements is discussed from a view of economics, including development economics and neoclassical economics, which makes it possible to stimulate quantitative analysis on the effects of implementing Voluntary Agreements. After that, taking China as a case, a method of quantitative analysis, which is to simulate the effects and economic impacts of implementing Voluntary Agreements with a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, is studied.