摘要：A significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions will require development of new
technologies if such reductions are to be achieved without excessive costs. An important question
is whether an agreement of the Kyoto type, which does not include elements related to research
and development (R&D) of new technologies, will give sufficient incentives to develop such new
technologies. On the one hand, since greenhouse gas emissions will become costly for countries
and private producers, countries and individual producers will have incentives to undertake effort
and costs to develop new technologies. On the other hand, R&D in one country is not only
advantageous for this country, but usually also for other countries. The reason for this is that
producers in these countries in many cases will learn from the R&D project, for example, through
(informal) networks, journals, and in some cases through the import of goods from the country
where the new technology is developed. The purpose of the paper is to discuss properties of an
international climate agreement of the Kyoto type when R&D investments undertaken in one
country are beneficial also for other countries. We examine whether a Kyoto type of agreement
can provide the correct social amount of aggregate emissions and R&D investments in new
technologies. We argue that the outcome of a Kyoto type agreement will differ from the social
optimum. In particular, for a given level of abatement a Kyoto type agreement provides too little
R&D investments relative to the social optimum.
关键词：Climate policy, Kyoto, international environmental agreements, R&D,
technology spillovers.
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