Author: Sarani Saha

Publisher: ProQuest

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780549363200

This thesis considers the problem of provision of public good--both global and domestic. The first part of the thesis looks at how heterogeneity among countries affect their incentives to join an international environmental agreement (IEA). Understanding the effects of heterogeneity is important in designing international treaties like the Kyoto protocol. The countries differ in damage costs from emissions. A two-stage game of IEA formation is solved and analyzed to reflect the effect of heterogeneity. Given the damage costs, the model can predict analytically the size and type of an agreement. The results indicate that the agreement is larger in presence of heterogeneity than it is when all the countries are homogeneous. The trade-off result between depth and breadth of an agreement, as found in the models with identical countries, is present in the heterogeneous case as well. Broad agreements are found to be shallow while deep agreements are narrow.