Economic incentives such as environmental taxes can create attractive markets for environmentally sound products and process technologies. Many European countries have a long tradition with environmental taxes but recent figures indicate that the share of green tax revenues in the EU-15 GDP is slightly declining. This is surprising since several governments had declared they would gradually shift the fiscal burden from labour to pollution. This paper tries to explain the fiscal inertia by analysing the role of the taxation base, fiscal neutrality, government failure with respect to the use of economic instruments and the dependence of government budgets on consumption-driven economic growth. The paper concludes that the initial focus on the double dividend hypothesis has strongly limited the impact of green taxes. A green tax reform based on consumption taxes that are differentiated according to the environmental impact of products could be more effective and efficient.
If economic arguments could make such a strong case for early action and policy change to address the threats of climate change, then could the same be possible for biodiversity loss? The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has been exploring this question since the initiative was launched by Germany and the European Commission in 2007. Half a decade later this publication based on a chapter included in the book “Nature in the Balance: The Economics of Biodiversity” (eds. Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn), describes the life of TEEB to date, progress made towards its goal of mainstreaming the economics of nature, the main challenges as the initiative begins a phase of implementation, as well as the responses of the TEEB community.
This report presents a comprehensive overview of the various green economy knowledge products developed and implemented by the UN system. Prepared as a response to the 18th meeting of the Environment Management Group (EMG) senior officials, the report compiles and analyses the results of the EMG’s Issue Management Group on Green Economy stocktaking exercise on existing UN system-wide web-based green economy platforms and resources.
The report compiles toolkits, best practices, lessons learned and analytical and assessment methodologies that support the acquisition of green economy knowledge and capacity building. The publication’s objective is threefold:
This paper presents a new research agenda on climate change and green growth from the perspective of the division of labor in classical economics. The paper covers three major dimensions of green growth (i.e. carbon emissions, environmental protection and material resources use) and some related important topics, as well as the fresh policy implications of the new research agenda. Typical marginal analysis in a given structure of the division of labor suggests that “green” action is a burden to economic development. Therefore, climate negotiation has become a burden-sharing game and has reached a stalemate. New thinking is badly needed to rescue these negotiations and to drive a shift to a new “green growth” paradigm. The proposed new research agenda represents an effort to create a new narrative on climate change and green growth. Because the new research agenda can theoretically predict the possibility that a more competitive structure of the division of labor could be triggered by “green” policy, it has promising policy implications for various important challenges facing us in the 21st century.