International Climate Agreements and the Scream of Greta

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

Trade, Development and Political Economy presents

International Climate Agreements and the Scream of Greta

Authors: Giovanni Maggi and Robert Staiger

The world is in immediate peril, as countries are not doing enough to keep Earth’s temperature from rising to near-catastrophic levels, and various attempts at international cooperation have failed. Why is this problem so intractable? Can we expect an 11th-hour solution to the problem? Will some of the countries, or even all, succumb on the equilibrium path? We address these questions through a formal model that emphasizes the role of two major issues: the intra-temporal externalities that a country’s policies exert on other countries, and the inter-temporal externalities that the current generation’s policies exert on future generations. We examine the interaction between these two issues and the extent to which international agreements can mitigate the problem.

Giovanni Maggi 

Yale University

Giovanni Maggi is the Howard Leach Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Yale University. He has done path-breaking work on the political economy of trade policy, especially international trade agreements. His work has been published in top Economics journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies. He has been a co-editor of the Journal of International Economics and an associated editor of the American Economic Review. Professor Maggi holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford University.

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For more information, please contact Devashish Mitra, dmitra@syr.edu or to request additional accommodations, please contact Morgan Bicknell, mebickne@syr.edu.