Dear Colleagues,

Putting a price on carbon has proven to be a key measure in encouraging the international efforts to curb emissions, by minimizing the social cost of carbon abatement from an economic standpoint. During this decade, a number of countries and sub-national jurisdictions have begun to implement carbon pricing in the form of carbon taxes and GHG emissions trading systems (ETSs). Amid the expansion of the carbon markets created under these policy measures, the size of the voluntary offset market, in which credits from carbon reduction or carbon absorption is voluntarily traded, is also rapidly growing and is projected to increase significantly.

Furthermore, economists have predicted that a unified global carbon market would emerge, triggering the necessary investments to transition to a low-carbon economy. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement entered into effect in 2016, providing an entry point for existing and new markets, which sends a strong signal to carbon markets and encourages the parties involved to cooperate in order to attain their GHG mitigation targets. Accordingly, there is rising interest in linking carbon markets, and progress on ETS linking has been being made. Nevertheless, given the heterogeneous nature of the carbon market systems in each country, many real barriers exist, and relevant studies are severely lacking, especially concerning the region of Northeast Asia.

Meanwhile, there is a growing awareness that businesses must also steer their activities in directions that contribute to the betterment of society as a whole. Both external stakeholders (including the government, domestic and foreign business partners, financial institutions, consumers, and social-sector organizations) and shareholders are demanding that businesses assume an unprecedented level of responsibility for the development of a sustainable society in addition to the expected corporate profits. The problem of climate change has taken on particular urgency. Companies, for their part, have begun to address climate change as a major business risk and have tried to mitigate it in their business opportunities accordingly, while also facing the need to respond to changing government policies such as carbon pricing.

Therefore, this Special Issue pays attention to the carbon pricing towards the net zero carbon era and intends to be devoted to the following topics and keywords. The original research articles based on macroscopic or empirical approaches as well as reviews are welcome.

Topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Policy Effects of Carbon Pricing Policy.
• Carbon Market linkage.
• Voluntary Carbon Offset Markets.
• Industrial decarbonization strategies in response to carbon pricing and carbon markets.

We look forward to your interest and receiving your contributions.

Dr. Sunhee Suk
Prof. Dr. Yongsung Cho
Dr. Xianbing Liu
Guest Editors

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• carbon pricing
• carbon market
• carbon tax
• corporate carbon management
• emission trading scheme
• net zero
• voluntary carbon offset market