The Effects Of Transport Carbon Emissions Tax On Transport Mode Choice And Social Welfare

On the one hand, the socialization of production makes supply chain nodes more and more decentralized, which leads a lot of transport activities are needed in order to solve the contradiction between supply and demand and also makes the transportation more and more important in social and economic activities. But on the other hand, frequent transportation activities produced huge amounts of carbon emissions, which makes that transport industry has become one of the three largest source of carbon emissions and reducing transport carbon emissions is imperative. Therefore, researching the problems about transport mode selection including carbon emissions factors is useful for achieving sustainable transportation.Based on the game theory, this paper researches the effects of carbon emissions regime respectively from the enterprises’angle and the government’s angle.This paper firstly focuses on the reaction of the company to the carbon emissions tax regime. This paper gets a monopoly manufacturer’s optimal production decision and transport mode selection decision under the situation that government charge tax to transport carbon emissions and transport activity players share the emissions responsibility. We focus on the effect of Carbon Tax and manufacturer’s emissions responsibility on transport mode selection. Further, we obtain conditions on emissions allocation proportion between manufacturer and3PL of a transport mode under which carbon tax can force transport mode shifting. Our results show that a relative small tax can force transport mode shifting when3PL encourage manufacture to select cleaner mode by adjusting emissions allocation proportion. Also, when the tax is just equal to the mode shifting threshold, we find that the profit of the manufacturer selecting the cleaner mode is the same as the one of manufacturer selecting the dirty mode manufacturer, but emissions can be largely reduced by selecting the cleaner mode. So the manufacturer would select the cleaner mode under the driver of the manufacturer’s environment consciousness.Then, this paper analyzes the optimal production decision and transport mode selection decision under the situation that the consumers are willing to pay higher prices for eco-friendly products. We find that both consumer environmental awareness and carbon emissions tax can drive the manufacturer choose clearn thransport mode.Last, this paper analyzes how carbon emissions affect the social welfare and explores the government’s optimal carbon-emission tax strategies. We find that:(i) whether or not the transport carbon-emission tax can increase social welfare depends on the relationships among the social cost of carbon (SCC), the transportation mode shifting threshold (TMST) and the biggest carbon-emission tax rate that a company can afford (BCRA);(ii) a greater SCC implies a higher probability of improving social welfare via imposing transportation carbon emissions; and (iii) a smaller TMST or BCRA yields a higher probability of improving the social welfare when a carbon-emission tax is imposed. Further study shows that imposing a carbon-emission tax on the product with a higher production cost, a bigger product volume, or a bigger product density can increase the probability of improving social welfare by employing carbon-emission tax regime. Moreover, between the different transportation modes, if there is a smaller transportation costs difference or a greater carbon emissions difference, then the probability of improving the social welfare by the transportation mode shifting will be higher.Our research is helpful to the manufacturer in making sustainable operation decision and to the government in making a reasonable carbon emissions tax regime.