A Behavioral Economics Analysis of Environmental Policies in China and USA

DOI

10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.038How to use a DOI?

Keywords

General environmental economics, energy government policy, sustainable development, general fiscal policies and behaviour of economic agents, microeconomic behavior: underlying principles

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to compare the different environmental policies between China and USA, namely the policies aimed at tackling global warming. China produces about 23 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide, compared to 21 percent from the United States with China being the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide since about 2006. The current US administration has made it clear that tackling climate change is not high on the agenda of US policy. On the other hand, China has started to conduct central environmental inspections, carried out guidelines to control air, water and soil pollution, published its own plans to realize the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In this article, we will use a variety tools from behavioural economics to draw direct comparisons between USA and China in terms of the vastly different attitudes towards environmental policy. Specifically, we will use various techniques and models from behavioural economics, namely, reference dependence, hyperbolic discounting, loss aversion, status quo bias and other-regarding preferences to explain why environmental policy are so different between the two economies, despite the need for resolving environmental issues being integral to long-term sustainability.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Muyang Chen
AU  - Gavin Kader
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/14
TI  - A Behavioral Economics Analysis of Environmental Policies in China and USA
BT  - Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Economic and Business Management (FEBM 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 223
EP  - 230
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.038
DO  - 10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.038
ID  - Chen2020
ER  -