“We can’t introduce additional environmental policies. Won’t they negatively impact our economic growth?”
This is a common concern for many policymakers around the world. Available evidence is not yet conclusive, indicating both gains for competitiveness in some cases and competitiveness decline in others. Perhaps more importantly, the empirical analysis on this topic as a whole is surprisingly sparse, particularly for developing countries.
A lot has been said about the surprise results coming in from recent elections and referendums across the globe, and many point to the same thing: growing dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the status quo. Despite rapid progress – or at least the appearance of progress – since the close of World War II, the basic tenets of our prosperity including free trade, free markets and globalization writ large are being called into question.
And perhaps justly so. In spite of the large uplift of population from absolute poverty levels – principally in China but across the emerging economies – social inequality between and within countries has rarely been as high, with the top 8 income earners in the world now grossing the equivalent of the bottom 3.6 billion of the world population.
At a meeting of community organisations in Ibadan, Nigeria, local government officials and academics explored how to deal with the risks facing Africa's urban poor. Challenging long-held assumptions about how African cities work – and who holds the power – will be key to tackling the build-up of risk.
African cities can be risky places. From the everyday threats of infectious diseases and traffic accidents, to dangers as diverse as collapsing buildings and exploding oil tankers, people living in urban centres negotiate a range of hazards on a daily basis.
Over the last two years, the Urban Africa: Research and Knowledge (Urban ARK) research programme has shown that the actual events causing injury, loss of life and damage to property in cities occur as a result of an accumulation of risk.
Digital finance is the unexpected revolutionary – but which side will it take? With the help of digital finance, urbane consumers can glide gracefully and seamlessly through their shopping experiences, migrants far from home can move hard-earned money cheaply to their families, small businesses can access credit lines in minutes through big data-driven profiling, and savers can navigate their investment opportunities with pinpoint accuracy. Will digital finance, then, deliver an all-purpose public good, or do we first need to manage possible constraints or even downsides?
Karnataka is the fifth most industrialised state in India and among the top producers of cement and iron and steel. As per the Green Growth Strategy for Karnataka, developed by GGGI, the industrial sector in the state is a dominant electricity consumer, with cement and iron and steel plants accounting for almost 40% of the total industrial electricity demand. In this context, the strategy identified Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) as an important energy efficiency (EE) measure that could be harnessed by the state, especially for the cement and iron and steel industries.
From instituting carbon taxes to strengthening social and economic resilience, finance ministers have access to a wide range of policy instruments with which to manage the effects of climate change. A new initiative, Climate Action Peer Exchange (CAPE), aims to provide a capacity-building forum for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and advisory support for finance ministries. The initiative brings together finance ministers, senior technical staff, and other relevant stakeholders to design climate-smart macroeconomic policies, discuss fiscal-policy measures for mitigating the impact of climate change, and develop financing strategies for implementing the nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
What is a ‘Green Energy Economy’ (GEE)? Opinions differ, but it can be defined as the scientific and policy subject area that focuses on how the expansion of resource-efficient and low-carbon energy technology systems, markets and services can bring together economic, environmental, social and security aspects. A key focus of a GEE is on policies and strategies that are designed to foster the rapid transition towards sustainable energy-economy systems. The 2008–2009 global financial crisis led to the implementation of numerous ‘green growth’ economic stimulus packages (mostly fiscal incentives) that targeted low-carbon energy technologies. These initiatives were quickly presented as the key elements in the transition to green growth, in which low-carbon energy technologies would play a pivotal role.