A range of policy options are available for driving green growth. This document outlines these options and summarises many of the issues that need to be taken into account when embarking on a green growth strategy.
This document accompanies the publications Towards Green Growth and Towards Green Growth: Monitoring Progress - OECD Indicators.
Researchers have long been interested in whether environmental regulations discourage investment, reduce labour demand, or alter patterns of international trade. But estimating those consequences of regulations requires devising a means of measuring their stringency empirically. While creating such a measure is often portrayed as a data-collection problem, this paper identifies four fundamental conceptual obstacles, which the authors label multidimensionality, simultaneity, industrial composition, and capital vintage. The paper then describes the long history of attempts to measure environmental regulatory stringency, and assess their relative success in light of those obstacles. Finally, the authors propose a new measure of stringency that would be based on emissions data and could be constructed separately for different pollutants.
This toolkit focuses on inclusive green growth—growth that not only helps green economies, but also helps move towards sustainable development by ensuring environmental sustainability contributes to, or at least does not come at the expense of, social progress. While there is good reason to think that improved environmental performance will benefit the poorest and most vulnerable, green growth policies must be carefully designed to maximise benefits and minimise costs for them, particularly during the transition. There is thus a critical need for policy design that also ensures that skills are upgraded and that jobs are decent, that vulnerable groups are not marginalised or left behind, and that revenues from fiscal reforms are also channeled into broader social protection and health measures.
A number of the tools that will be mobilised to implement inclusive green growth policies are "classic" public management tools, but this document focuses only on the most relevant instruments vis-à-vis green growth in developing countries, as these instruments are widely known and implemented the world over. What this toolkit aims for instead is to provide policy-makers with:
This volume examines the experiences of 21 developed and developing countries in adjusting their training provision to meet the new demands of a greener economy. Analysts started by identifying the drivers of transformation to a greener economy – changes in the physical environment itself and changes induced by government regulations, more efficient technologies and changes in consumer demand. Then they assessed the effect of these changes on employment, identifying areas of job growth and of job loss
Only then could researchers start to understand how skill requirements are changing and are expected to change in the future, and to examine how well national training systems are anticipating and responding to these new needs. Their analysis shows that skills development is critical to unlocking the employment potential of green growth, yet skills shortages are becoming an obstacle in realising this potential. The report recommends that countries devise strategies based on well-informed policy decisions, social dialogue, and coordination among ministries and between employers and training providers.
This book draws on work from across several parts of the OECD and explores policy actions for the deployment of new technologies and innovations as they emerge: investment in research and development, support for commercialisation, strengthening markets and fostering technology diffusion. Competition will be essential to bring out the best solutions.
Key findings include: