The Moral Limits of Market-Based Mechanisms: An Application to the International Maritime Sector

Abstract

This paper questions the dominance of market-based mechanisms (MBMs) as the primary means of climate change mitigation. It argues that, not only they are unsuccessful on their own terms, but also they actually make the task more difficult by the unintended consequence of normalising the act of polluting and crowding out alternatives. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to draw a link between two bodies of literature. The first is the business ethics literature on the dominance of market-based rather than direct regulation, and the second is the literature on market ethics, particularly the work of Michael Sandel on how MBMs crowd out non-market norms. The empirical contribution is to use the international maritime transport sector to illustrate the way market-based regulation renders alternatives such as direct regulation and supply-side approaches invisible.

International practice analysis of the negative list: Chinese Example of shipping market access

“…It is important to summarize the framework and highlights of the free trade agreements, to measure the extent of tariff reduction from various perspectives.And it is also necessary to make a quantitative assessment of the level of service trade liberalization of the member states (Sheng and Jin, 2022). It also discusses the moral limits of market-based mechanisms under by using the international maritime transport sector (Monios, 2022).…”