EU ETS revenues and member states investment strategies

Abstract

This work investigates on how EU Member States spend their income coming from allowance auctioning within the European Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). After a brief overview of the principles of an ETS, the analysis focused on the design of an auctioning system. Subsequently, the EU ETS has been taken as practical instance to disentangle the implementation of an auctioning system within a functioning emission scheme. After this, I took the data on auctioning revenues from the EIONET database and deployed a detailed description of each Member State’s spending pattern. Furthermore, I asked each Member State to provide some further information on revenues spending. What emerged is that, in some cases, the data in the EIONET seem to comply with what disclosed by Member States. Yet, those further information shed clearer light on the matter..