Climate change is a phenomenon beset with major uncertainties and researchers should include them in Integrated Assessment Models. However, including further dimensions in IAM models comes at a cost. In particular, it makes most of these models suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this...

The EU has a consolidated climate and energy regulation: it played a pioneering role by adopting a wide range of climate change policies and establishing the first regional Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). These policies, however, raise several concerns regarding both their environmental...

This paper provides a review of the literature on competitiveness and leakage concerns associated with differentiated climate abatement commitments among countries. The literature reviewed is not exhausted, but it is sufficient to provide a balanced view of both academics and policy circles....

This paper investigates the link between development, economic growth, and the economic losses from natural disasters in a normative analytical framework, with an illustration on hurricane flood risks in New Orleans. It concludes that, where capital accumulates through increased density of...

China’s unbundling reform in 2002 aimed to introduce competitiveness into the power industry, especially the generation sector, to improve its operational efficiency. Meanwhile, great concern about a range of environmental problems and global climate change increasingly calls for saving energy...

We develop a theoretical model of directed technical change in which clean (zero emissions) and dirty (emissions-intensive) technologies are embodied in long-lived capital. We show how obsolescence costs generated by technological embodiment create inertia in a transition to clean growth....

Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are widely used to analyse macroeconomic and sectoral effects of climate policies. Developing new and improving existing carbon-free energy technologies will be crucial to limit the long-term economic costs of mitigation policies. Such technologies are...

This paper studies the economic implications of climate-change-induced variations in tourism demand, using a world CGE model. The model is first re-calibrated at some future years, obtaining hypothetical benchmark equilibria, which are subsequently perturbed by shocks, simulating the effects of...

In this paper, we show that drought has a positive effect on the incidence of civil war over the 1945-2005 period in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use the Palmer Drought Severity Index which is a richer measurement of drought than the measures used in the literature (rainfall and temperature) as it...

This paper proposes a new tool to assess sustainability and make the concept of sustainable development operational. It considers its multi-dimensional structure combining the information deriving from a selection of relevant sustainability indicators belonging to economic, social and...