Algunas implicaciones éticas y analíticas de la microfundamentación en la economía del cambio climático

This paper explores a simple model that highlights for a wider audience some of the main elements of the economics of climate change that have motivated academic debate over the last decade. After the release in 2006 of the Stern Report, academic economists have argued over two crucial aspects involved in economic modeling of this global problem: the particular choice as microfoundations of certain parameters describing ethical behaviors regarding both the future and inequality, and the particular strategies for modeling variables that exhibit stochastic nature in the distant future. The simple model herein exposed is able to deal with many of the issued of the first aspect. The motivation is to make available to students of economics some of the ethical and analytical consequences of economic theory's conventional strategy utilized in models to analyze the economics of global climate change. The first section of the paper presents an exhibit of the model that includes a numerical representation for illustration purposes. Section two links the choice over the discount rate to two notions of economic equilibrium. Section three presents a brief discussion on the consistency of the parametrical choices conventionally made in the economic literature on climate change. Finally, some words are included for concluding purposes.