Kyoto protocol: success or failure?

Abstract

Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing the carbon dioxide emissions in order to prevent anthropogenic climate change. Since there is no consensus about the effectiveness of the Protocol, we will try to shed some light on this issue. Specifically, we will evaluate if countries which has signed and ratified the agreement have reduced significantly their emissions. To do that, we analyze the carbon dioxide in different countries among the last decades. We find out that the Protocol has reduced the emissions of European countries, while the rest of the countries do not exhibit those satisfactory results. Additionally, we observe that there is not a process of temporal convergence at all between the analyzed countries. Those results may be useful to design environmental policies routed to avoid the global warming issue.