• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.347-364
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• 2021

Carbon neutral policy in Korea pays limited attention to the concept of sustainable economic growth. This limitation can be compared with other countries' carbon neutral policies such as US, UK and China where the climate change policies are closely connected to economic policies to boost further economic growth. This paper adopts a Ramsey growth model to account for the impact of carbon neutral policy on long-term economic growth and the accumulation capital. The model incorporates the Hartwick rule to allow sustainability of economic growth by transforming resource input into other input factor for growth. The analysis provides a possibility of low accumulation of capital as a result of carbon neutral policy in the absence of effective transformation of fossil-fuel factor into growth-related productive capital. Such low capital stock can be more aggravated when there exists a rent-seeking behavior of various interest groups with voracity to exploit social capital.