The Surprising Vulnerability of New Zealand Manufacturing to CO2 Emissions Pricing: The Lessons of an International Comparison

This paper compares the cost impact of emissions pricing in NZ manufacturing with the evidence available for United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Germany, Netherlands and Australia. It is observed that, relative to the comparator economies, a much larger share of NZ GDP is potentially at risk as a result of emissions pricing (even excluding the direct and indirect effects of agriculture). Possible reasons for this unexpected finding include: dissimilarities in industry structure, applicable emission factors for indirect emissions, level of aggregation at which industries are evaluated across countries and concentration of emissions in a small number of firms/industries. The paper identifies manufacturing activities are most emission intensive in NZ and in comparator economies. While some emission intensive activities are common to all examined economies, the food processing cluster is found to be at risk of losing competitiveness only in NZ and Australia.