Carbon Lorenz curves

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First it exhibits that standard tools in the measurement of income inequality such as the Lorenz curve and the Gini-inclex, can successfully be applied to the issues of inequality measurement of carbon emissions and the equity of abatement policies across countries. These tools allow policy-makers and the general public to grasp at a single glance the impact of conventional distribution rules such as equal caps or grand-fathering, or more sophisticated ones, on the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions. Second, using the Samuelson rule for the optimal provision of a public good, the Pareto-optimal distribution of carbon emissions is compared with the distribution that follows if countries follow Nash-Cournot abatement strategies. It is shown that the Pareto-optimal distribution under the Samuelson rule can be approximated by the equal cap division, represented by the diagonal in the Lorenz curve diagram. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.