The hotspots, reference routes, and research trends of marginal abatement costs: A systematic review

As one of the most effective means of evaluating environmental policies, marginal abatement costs (MACs) have been adopted in a growing body of research. This study characterizes the MAC-related literature from 1993 to 2018 on Web of Science based on a systematic review, bibliometric analysis, and mind-mapping. The results classify the research hotspots into influential factors, methods, and empirical applications. The three most frequently mentioned influential factors are technical change, discount rates, and energy prices. Compared with top-down models, bottom-up models, including engineering model and expert-based method, are the most widely used; improvements in the former focus on strengthening market behavior effect, while those in the latter aim to overcome the weaknesses of negative costs and lack of interaction across measures. MAC applications focus on environmental policies with two new research areas recently emerging: co-benefits and sectoral abatement costs. Furthermore, a reference route is proposed by summarizing the applicability of methods and matching relationships among influential factors, methods, and empirical problems. Finally, potential research directions are summarized based on the identified research hotspots and a similar co-word analysis in marginal cost field, such as considering the effects of both multiple influential factors and the interaction among factors on MACCs.