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December 29, 2010
Abstract
General equilibrium models have been used for decades to obtain insights into the economic implications of policies and decisions. Despite successes, however, these economic models have substantive limitations. Many of these limitations are due to computational and methodological constraints that can be overcome by leveraging recent advances in computer architecture, numerical methods, and economics research. Motivated by these considerations, we are developing a new modeling framework: the Community Integrated Model of Economic and Resource Trajectories for Humankind (CIM-EARTH). In this paper, we describe the key features of the CIM-EARTH framework and initial implementation, detail the model instance we use for studying the impacts of a carbon tax on international trade and the sensitivity of these impacts to assumptions on the rate of change in energy efficiency and labor productivity, and present results on the extent to which carbon leakage limits global reductions in emissions for some policy scenarios.