The Overseas Development Institute, working alongside Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit and the International Poverty Reduction Center in China, have been developing a collaborative, research, policy engagement and knowledge transfer exchange programme. The aim is to provide stakeholders with firm evidence of ways to promote effective investment in green growth. This working paper presents the findings of the programme’s scoping study, conducted in India and China, which sought to identify and better understand drivers for green growth.
The paper begins by outlining the tenets of the green growth paradigm, defining the concept of green growth as being both sustainable and inclusive. It then presents the findings of the scoping study and looks at the evolution of green growth thinking. The authors also explore the potential for sharing lessons learnt, both between India and China and with other countries, and set out a proposal for identifying policy and initiative case studies for further analysis and impact assessment.
The scoping study consisted of:
Skills Development for Inclusive and Sustainable Growth in Developing Asia-Pacific brings together views, perspectives, and insights from policy makers, practitioners, and leading experts on skills development for inclusive and sustainable growth.
As France works out its plan to tackle climate change issues, questions are arising in the forest sector as to how sectoral mitigation programs such as those designed to enhance fuel wood consumption or to stimulate in-forest carbon sequestration may coincide with an inter-sectoral program such as an economy-wide carbon tax.
This paper provides insights into this question by exploring the impacts of (1) a combination of a carbon tax and a fuel wood policy, and (2) a combination of a carbon tax and a sequestration policy on (i) the economy of the forest sector, and (ii) the dynamics of the forest resource. To do this, a modified version of the French Forest Sector Model (FFSM) is used and simulations are carried out on a 2020 time horizon.
The taxation of different sources and uses of energy (particularly those that give rise to emissions of greenhouse gases) will play a key role in governments’ efforts to mitigate the scale of global warming and climate change. At present, effective tax rates vary widely across different sources and uses of energy within countries, as well as across countries. This publication provides the first systematic statistics of such effective tax rates - on a comparable basis - for each OECD country, together with ‘maps’ that illustrate graphically the wide variations in tax rates per unit of energy or per tonne of CO2 emissions. These statistics and maps should be an invaluable tool for policymakers, analysts and researchers considering both domestic fiscal reform in response to climate change and other environmental challenges (e.g. to achieve emissions reductions targets most cost-effectively) and wider international responses.
At a time when extreme weather events are coming with increasing frequency—and an increased price tag for clean-up—cash-strapped governments are seeking new solutions to build climate resilience. A new World Economic Forum Report offers some hope. The Green Investment Report: The Ways and Means to Unlock Private Finance for Green Growth finds that approximately US$ 34 billion in additional public funding is needed to stablise global temperatures at an acceptable level—less than the US$ 50 billion recently approved by the United States Congress for rebuilding resilience after Hurricane Sandy. By increasing climate-related public funding from its current level of US$ 96 billion to around US$ 130 billion, it could mobilise private capital in the range of US$ 570 billion. This would address the US$ 700 billion in investment that the Report finds is required to put the world on a climate-resilient path towards green growth.
A Schumpeterian case can be made for boosting Green Growth in a global economic crisis. The best way to achieve this is a combination of R&D subsidies to redirect growth from polluting to clean economic activities and a credible, rising carbon tax to speed up the transition to the carbon-free era. If a carbon tax is infeasible, renewables subsidies might be a second-best alternative to reduce the duration of the fossil fuel era and curb cumulative carbon emissions despite some adverse, short-run Green Paradox effects.