For more than a decade, African economies have achieved impressive and sustained growth. In 2014, growth rates averaged 3.9 per cent – only East and South Asia grew faster, at 5.0 per cent. However, this growth can be described as largely non-inclusive because of its limited contribution to job creation, broad participation and overall improvement to people’s living standards.The challenge facing Africa is not only how to maintain such rapid growth, but how to translate it into sustained and inclusive development based on economic diversification that creates jobs, contributes to reduced inequality and poverty rates, enhances access to basic services, and corrects market failures that undermine environmental sustainability. This report is to promote understanding and the adoption of inclusive green economy policies that foster sustainable structural transformation in the region.
Innovative financial mechanisms, though widely discussed in the international community, are still relatively uncommon and little information is tracked at the project level, which is where innovation in financial structuring actually occurs. However, when deployed in the markets with robust financial policy frameworks in place, innovative financial mechanism have demonstrated the potential to successfully blend public and private capital as means to mitigate high investment risks, thereby unlocking greater private sector investment in climate projects. To replicate this initial success and deploy them at scale, GGGI believes that policymakers, public financial institutions, and other stakeholders must first appreciate the function, characteristic, and use of such mechanisms, specifically in the context of the project development lifecycle.
Kazakhstan is a vast but sparsely populated country rich in natural resources, located in the centre of the Eurasian landmass. In recent years, it has embarked on building a greeneconomy, taking the lead among its Central Asian neighbours. The country has set itself a clear target: by 2030, emissions are supposed to be reduced by between 15 and 25 per cent, compared with the 1990 level
As part of the country's green economy strategy, Kazakhstan adopted the “National Concept for Transition to a Green Economy up to 2050” in 2013 outlining the principles of the Green Economy as a future development path. The objective is to bring the share of new renewable energy in electricity generation from zero to 3 per cent by 2020, and then to raise it further to 30 per cent by 2030 and 50 per cent by 2050. This study looks into what Kazakhstan has done for promoting the renewable energy, and provide an outlook.
Low-carbon, 'green' economic growth is necessary to simultaneously improve human welfare and avoid the worst impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. Infrastructure choices underpin both the growth and the carbon intensity of the economy. This Perspective explores the barriers to investing in low-carbon infrastructure and some of the policy levers available to overcome them. The barriers to decarbonizing infrastructure 'nest' within a set of barriers to infrastructure development more generally that cause spending on infrastructure—low-carbon or not—to fall more than 70% short of optimal levels. Developing countries face additional barriers such as currency and political risks that increase the investment gap. Low-carbon alternatives face further barriers, such as commercialization risk and financial and public institutions designed for different investment needs. While the broader barriers to infrastructure investment are discussed in other streams of literature, they are often disregarded in literature on renewable energy diffusion or climate finance, which tends to focus narrowly on the project costs of low- versus high-carbon options.
Green growth is increasingly being seen as a means of simultaneously meeting current and future climate change obligations and reducing unemployment. This paper uses detailed industry-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistic's Green Goods and Services survey to examine how the provision of so-called green goods and services has affected various aspects of the US economy. The authors' descriptive results reveal that those states and industries that were relatively green in 2010 became even greener in 2011. To investigate further the authors include green goods and services in a production function. The results show that between 2010 and 2011 industries that have increased their share of green employment have reduced their productivity although this negative correlation was only for the manufacture of green goods and not for the supply of green services.