There are many claims and counter-claims about whether green growth creates or destroys jobs. But fully assessing the consequences of environmental policies for employment presents a considerable challenge, and at present it is not possible for policy-makers to assess conflicting claims about the quality and quantity of green jobs that have already been created, or may be created in the future. One approach would be to focus on changes in employment in industries that provide environmental goods and services. Another would be to count the jobs created when firms adopt technologies with less environmental impact and switch to less polluting inputs, regardless of their primary outputs. Both approaches can be helpful for assessing the direct impact on jobs and the scale of structural change required by the transition to green growth. But green policies also affect labour markets indirectly through supply chains and through changes in overall demand. The destruction of ‘brown jobs’ in polluting industries should also be taken into account.
This research focuses on identifying the main policy strategies that could potentially contribute to the advance of three Latin American economies, namely Brazil, Chile and Mexico towards a green growth model that is social and inclusive, given the actual patterns of development of those economies. With this aim, firstly the past and current policies in each country in terms of economic, social and environmental indicators is identified and described. A detailed analysis follows for Brazil, Chile and Mexico, in which the authors propose a series of green growth indicators and choose a definition and classification of green growth sectors. There is also the estimation of an empirical model to explain the determinants of green house gas emissions and deforestation in Latin American countries. This paper broadly identifies the sectors that contribute to its increase and describe the main green policies applied in each country. In turn there is identification of the sectors with higher potential for the future. Finally, policy recommendations and reflections for the future is presented.
This manual provides guidance on how to use indicators in designing and implementing green economy policies at the national level. It seeks to support interested countries to use indicators as a tool for identifying priority issues, formulating and assessing green economy policy options, and evaluating the performance of policy implementation. Emphasis is placed on those policy options with “multiple dividends” across the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development.
Uncertainty about the future is an important determinant of well-being, especially in developing countries where financial markets and other market failures result in ineffective insurance mechanisms. However, separating the effects of future uncertainty from realised events, and then measuring the impact of uncertainty on utility, presents a number of empirical challenges. This paper aims to address these issues and provides supporting evidence to show that increased climate variability (a proxy for future income uncertainty) reduces farmers’ subjective well-being, consistent with the theory of optimal expectations (Brunnermeier & Parker, 2005 AER), using panel data from rural Ethiopia and a new data set containing daily atmospheric parameters. The magnitude of our result indicates that a one standard deviation (7%) increase in climate variability has an equivalent effect on life satisfaction to a two standard deviation (1-2%) decrease in consumption. This effect is one of the largest determinants of life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia.
Korea Environment Institute (KEI)’s Global Strategy Center has published Greenable, since 2012, to share global environmental issues and its related research conducted in KEI. This volume (Volume 2, 2014) helps advance knowledge on the measurement of progress for sustainable development. The articles in this volume include: Guidelines for the Development of Green Economy Indicators in Developing Countries; Case Studies for the Development and Use of Green Economy Indicators in Developing Countries; Korea's Sustainable Development Indicators: Characteristics and Usage; and Korea Environment Institute’s Research Projects on the Development of Indicators for Sustainable Development.