The Impacts of Carbon Tariff on Green Supply Chain Design

With the growing awareness of global warming, many companies worldwide are improving their supply chain sustainability, under pressure from the government or their own shareholders. However, not all countries around the world equally emphasize the threat. For example, some countries still have not implemented any carbon dioxide emission regulations to address this problem. Carbon regulations in only subglobal areas may result in even higher global emissions because of carbon leakage. One possible approach to cope with the carbon leakage problem is to impose carbon tariffs on the goods from unregulated countries. In this paper, a mathematical model is built to explore the impacts of carbon tariff imposition on the supply chain network design, where the carbon tariff is imposed when the goods flow from unregulated countries to regulated countries. Moreover, our paper provides a complete experimental study by applying this model in a real case study, Company G, a major Taiwan-based multinational company in the electronic products industry. The outcomes demonstrate the conditions where the introduction of carbon tariffs forces firms from unregulated countries to take actions to reduce carbon emissions.