한국 탄소배출권 시장의 효율성 분석

Abstract

As the development of technologies that can reduce carbon emissions and the conversion of energy production methods have not produced particularly meaningful effects, major countries have high expectations for the effect of regulating the total amount of carbon emissions through the carbon emission market. Since Korea is a country that emits a lot of greenhouse gases, it operates a carbon emission market with a large transaction volume. For this market to show the expected effect, the movement of the emission permit price must be efficient. So this study analyzed whether the carbon emission market in Korea is efficient, comparing it with the European emission market. To this end, the time-varying Hurst exponent was measured using daily data of Korea's KAU and Europe's EUA Futures markets. The main results are summarized as follows. First, the degree of informational efficiency of the price movement of carbon emission market is time-varying. Second, in both the Korean and European carbon markets, transaction prices did not move randomly at many times, and there were many inefficient periods in both markets. Third, the long memory characteristics were stronger and the inefficiency was more severe in the KAU market than in the EUA market. Fourth, although the informational efficiency of KAU market has generally improved since 2022, it has not yet reached the level of efficiency implied by the efficient market hypothesis. These results mean that despite the government's efforts so far, the emission trading market is not functioning sufficiently. Therefore, it is necessary to continuously improve the emission trading system in a way that can reduce carbon emissions through the market function.