"The briefing paper discusses alternative ways of including regional trade in bottom up energy economic models such as MARKAL or MESSAGE and explores general opportunities for including regional trade in modelling exercises. The countries at the two extremes in this analysis reflect the effect of the carbon intensity of the power sector in those countries, France being low and South Africa high. China by virtue of its enormous exports would also be expected to show a large difference in production and consumption based calculation of CO². At present these studies are being used to show that the net CO² emissions associated with consumption in some developed countries claiming to have reduced emissions, have rather increased. Why such analyses are of interest to a developing country like South Africa is due to the possible emergence of ‘carbon equalisation’ systems for imports to the EU, as alluded to in the section above, which would equal the carbon playing field for energy intensive imports."