Benchmark-based emission allocation in a cap-and-trade system

One of the important bottlenecks for the introduction of emission trading is how allowances should be distributed among the participants in a trading scheme. Both grandfathering on the basis of historic emissions and auctioning have important drawbacks. In this paper, we propose an allowance distribution rule based on benchmarking of production processes: each company's share in the total allowance is determined by its production level and a reference emission level per product. The scheme shows some important advantages compared to other schemes.