时间：2016年10月28日（周五）12：00-14：00 地点：国家发展研究院 朗润园 万众楼小教室 报告人：北京师范大学经济与工商管理学院，刘盼

标题：Resolving intergenerational conflict over the environment under the pareto criterion

摘要：Any policy designed to combat climate change will likely create intergenerational winners and losers. The standard response to such equity concerns is to postulate a social welfare function imposing weights on current and future generations. There is considerable disagreement about what these weights should be; indeed, any policy action may be justified by appropriate choice of weights even if it requires some generations to sacrifice for others. We sidestep this contentious issue and directly ask, can policy action be rationalized even after imposing the Pareto criterion, the restriction that no generation subsequent to policy action be made worse off than before? We study a “business as usual” (BAU) economy in which pollution is a by-product of productive activity by the current generation but “damages” production for future generations. Over time, conditions in the BAU economy become dire: it gets increasingly polluted, consumption falls and generational welfare levels decline. A government introduces costly pollution abatement and finances it via distorting taxes and borrowing on perfect international markets. Pollution levels start to decline, generating downstream welfare gains, some of which the government taxes away, without hurting anyone in a Pareto sense, to help pay off the debt, that too, in finite time. Along the transition, every generation faces less pollution, consumes more and is happier than if life had continued in the BAU world.