| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 都市計劃研究所 === 88 === Economic and environmental systems are closely related. Environmental system not only provides the resources and energy to economic system for producing goods and services but also receives the wastes discharged from economic system. When economic system gets larger without due attention to the carrying capacity of the environment it may lead to environmental degradation and natural resources depletion. The seriously degraded environment can affect our living environments and decrease economic productivity. Because of the complex relationships between economic and environmental systems, environment policy may cause general equilibrium effects on economic activities. Thus it is important to conduct policy evaluation before the policy is executed. In the recent decade, computable general equilibrium model has been widely used to estimate the economic effects of environmental policy.
This study constructed a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the economic effects for three cases: when the government levies air pollutant emission tax, controls the amount of air pollutants emitted, and levies TDS emission tax. This study distinguishes itself from other studies along this line in that it uses embodied energy as measurement to explore the economic effects of environmental policy. Because energy is a kind of physical unit, it thus can reflect the real cost of resources requirement for producing goods and services. In addition, it can take into account non-valued natural resources used in the production such that resource costs of goods and services can be included. Some findings are as following:
1) Both pollutant emission tax and direct control result in a decrease in sectoral output volumes, but an increase in output prices.
2) From the perspective of embodied energy, direct control of air pollutant emission would not change production technology as assumed, however, the embodied energy per unit of output increases for the sectors that are restrained.
3) When TDS concentrations in the irrigation water decrease, the embodied energy per unit of agricultural output decreases. It means that embodied energy can also reflect the change of product cost.
Therefore, to examine environment policy from the perspective of embodied energy would broaden the dimension of discussion and thus get a better understanding on the impacts of environment policy.
|
|---|
