Abstract
The regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is a vital current issue, and the Taiwan government intends to list greenhouse gas as a pollutant by legislating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Bill (GGBI), which will require industries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in production processes. To access the magnitudes of influences of this new regulation on industries is an important issue. In this study, we assess and compare the incremental pollutant abatement cost (PAC) of GGBI regulation on Taiwan’s freeway bus service industry in 2008–2010 by applying the data envelopment analysis method with undesirable output variables. If the GGBI is implemented, the average incremental PAC in 2008–2010 are approximately NT$ 69.2 million respectively. In addition, the proportions of incremental PACs associated with GGBI in the aggregated PACs associated with Vehicular Air Pollutant Emission Standards and incremental GGBI regulations are less than 3 %.
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Notes
The Kyoto Protocol has been effective since February 16, 2005.
The bus service transportation industry also includes highway bus services (HBS), urban bus services (UBS), and tourist bus services (TBS).
The emission of \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) in bus service transportation industry was 1.03 million ton in 2010, which counts 2.9 % in whole transportation industry (please refer to http://www.iot.gov.tw/public/data/282211105171.pdf). The FBS industry consumed 146.4 K.L. of diesel fuel, which is 38.15 % of the total fuel consumption in the bus transportation industry. Therefore, it counts only 1.1 % (0.15 %) of \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) emissions to transportation sector (fuel combustion) in 2010 in Taiwan. Even though the empirical conclusion from the paper only regards a very small fraction of the emissions intended to be controlled under the proposed GGBI, our study results and conclusions are robust and convincing and could be applied to other analysis of stepwise environmental regulations.
MARKAL is a numerical model used to carry out economic analysis of different energy related systems at the country level to represent its evolution over a period of usually of 40–50 years and is employed by many modeling groups around the world. UK MARKAL was originally developed to provide insights for the Energy White Paper 2003 in the United Kingdom. Please refer to http://www.ucl.ac.uk/energy-models/models/uk-markal. (last retrieved: 02/05/2014).
We ignore the definitions and the expression of these axioms and assumptions in mathematics for simplicity. For the details, please refer to Färe et al. (2007).
The directional distance function may have multiple desirable and undesirable outputs. However, the output-based directional distance function assigns weights to all outputs (desirable and undesirable) when calculating technical efficiency.
In Kyoto Protocol, \(\hbox {CO}_{2},\hbox { CH}_{4},\hbox { N}_{2}\mathrm{O}\), HFCs, PFCs, and \(\hbox {SF}_{6}\) are the greenhouse gases used to calculate global warming potential. But in this study, we only use the \(\hbox {CO}_{2},\hbox { CH}_{4}\), and \(\hbox {N}_{2}\mathrm{O}\) in our calculation and estimation. One reason for adopting these three greenhouse gases only is that no emission coefficient of HFCs, PFCs, and \(\hbox {SF}_{6}\) for diesel fuel offered by Taiwan’s Management Table for the Emissions Coefficient of Greenhouse Gas Version 6.0. In addition, according to statistics of Taiwan’s EPA, 96.48 % of greenhouse gas emission was attributed to \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\), 0.54 % was attributed to \(\hbox {CH}_{4}\), and 1.16 % was attributed to \(\hbox {N}_{2}\mathrm{O}\), which count 98.18 % of Taiwan’s total greenhouse gas emission in 2010. (please refer to the website of Taiwan’s EPA for the details: http://www.epa.gov.tw/ch/artshow.aspx?busin=12379&art=2009011715443552&path=12437, in Chinses, last retrieved on 02/05/2014). The total percentage of SF6(1.02 %), PFCs(0.49 %), and HFCs(0.31 %) counts 1.82 % only. The negligence of these three greenhouse gas won’t influence the main results in this study. Therefore we use the \(\hbox {CO}_{2}, \hbox { CH}_{4}\), and \(\hbox {N}_{2}\mathrm{O}\) in our calculation and estimation. Besides, pollutant air includes particulate matter (PM), black smoke, and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
http://ivy2.epa.gov.tw/air-ei/%E6%8E%A8%E4%BC%B0%E6%89%8B%E5%86%8A7.0/%E9%99%84%E4%BB%B6%E4%BA%94/app5-T29.xls, lasted access: 05/21/2013.
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Chen, C.C. Assessing the Pollutant Abatement Cost of Greenhouse Gas Emission Regulation: A Case Study of Taiwan’s Freeway Bus Service Industry. Environ Resource Econ 61, 477–495 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-014-9803-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-014-9803-y