An overview of the distributional impact of global warming shows that the negative externalities of carbon-intensive development models are already significant in Africa. The most compelling reasons for promoting green investments in Africa is the direct economic returns in terms of savings and employment opportunities. Most renewable energy jobs created over the last few years have occurred outside Africa possibly another missed opportunity after the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution. Carbon-free technologies must not be used to sustain income inequality and macroeconomic imbalances between industrialized and developing countries, but to uniformly boost green investments.
Over the past 20 years, two major challenges have dominated international debate on sustainable development: the imperative of environmental protection and the eradication of all dimensions of poverty. Economic growth lies at the heart of both these issues. It is required to reduce poverty but, at the same time, needs to be decoupled from natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions in order to preserve the livelihoods of current and future generations. Several concepts aim to reconcile this dilemma and offer much to delineate green and inclusive growth, many important aspects remain vague. However, it is important to facilitate a systematic assessment of interactions (i.e., synergies and trade-offs) between the green and inclusive dimensions of growth as it is a central concern of policymakers.
A multitude of initiatives, networks and organisations have adopted the concept of ‘green growth’ in recent years, in particular following the 2012 Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. New and innovative concepts and approaches to green growth have been designed and tested in the field. In this context, the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED), through its Green Growth Working Group (GGWG) decided to contract an external organisation to take stock of different members’ environmentally sound and climate friendly private sector development initiatives over the past three years. The objective of this stocktaking report is to provide insight into the main trends related to green private sector development, identify different approaches to green growth in PSD initiatives, and point out emerging lessons.
The issue note focuses on one aspect of the social consequences of green growth, the labour market aspect, bearing in mind the importance of differences across countries, particularly by level of development, with the hope that it can provide some ideas for improving policy formation and analysis. It discusses the analytical frameworks that have informed past economic analyses of the potential impact of various green growth policies on labour markets, suggesting possible directions for future development of models to enable better analysis of potential impacts (Section 2). It then sketches some of the implications of the various frameworks for the likely distributional impacts of green growth policies (Section 3). In Section 4, evidence from countries’ experience with environmental policies is considered, along with empirical work on the likely future impacts of green growth policies. This leads to a discussion of how to mitigate potential adverse impacts of green growth policies on workers and households (Section 5).
This report summarises the findings of a project on green entrepreneurship in Tunisia financed by German international cooperation. The two-year project (2013/2014) was implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) within the framework of the programme for entrepreneurship and innovation (PAEI). A series of training courses were offered to a selected group of potential multipliers of the green business concept: local consultants, support organisations and college teachers, all already active in the promotion of entrepreneurship in general. They were trained by national and internal consultants. Over the two years, they built a strong network of promoters of green entrepreneurship and came up with an action plan for the time after the end of the German funded project.