Investigating the pollution content of trade flows and the importance of 'environmental trade balances' in addressing the problem of climate change

A crucial issue in addressing the problem of
climate change is the impact of trade flows on any one country's domestic
emissions generation (what governments are responsible for reducing under
the Kyoto Protocol). Moreover, since human consumption decisions are
commonly considered to lie at the heart of climate change problems,
attention is increasingly turning to accounting measures such as carbon
footprints, which measure emissions produced globally to meet local
consumption demand. In response to this, it has become increasingly common
to use appropriately augmented input-output accounts (produced as a
component of national accounts in most industrialised countries) to measure
emissions under different accounting principles and to estimate 'trade
balances' in emissions in a multi-sector, multi-region context.
The purpose of this Fellowship is to
facilitate the application of such techniques at a sub-national regional
level (with applications for the UK and US) and to develop appropriate
modelling frameworks to analyse the impacts of changes in policy and other
disturbances on pollution trade balances. This will involve application and
development of inter-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling
techniques and collaboration with a number of data providers and other
researchers in the fields of input-output analysis, economic modelling,
regional and environmental
science.