The EU 2020 Climate and Energy Package, in force since June 2009, commits the European Union to reduce its overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to at least 20% below their 1990 levels by 2020, pursuing the ambition to make Europe a low-carbon and energy-efficient economy over the next decade....

The Flemish economy is a very open economy and as such heavily relies on trade with both the neighbouring economies as well as more distanced economies and it also tries to attract foreign direct investments. The paper reviews the evolution and interrelation of some competitiveness indicators in...

EU climate policies advocate a shift towards green taxation. We address this issue in the context of tax on companies, focusing on the consequences for the cost of capital, the effective marginal tax rate and the effective average tax rate.We develop an indicator of effective green taxation...

This paper examines the role of electricity production from biomass with and without carbon capture and storage in sustaining low CO 2 emission pathways to 2100. It quantifies the effect of the availability of biomass resources and technologies within a general equilibrium framework. We assess...

GDP and employment effects of climate policyCGEGDP and employment effects of climate policy

About 50% of New Zealand's greenhouse gases are not carbon dioxide, being mostly methane and nitrous oxide. Consequently the exchange rates between different gases - that is their CO2 equivalence - could have significant effects on the cost to New Zealand of meeting international emissions...

The Stern/Nordhaus controversy has polarized the widely disparate beliefs about what to do in order to tackle the climate challenge. Between Nordhaus' ``policy ramp'' which recommends gradual action to avoid costly premature low-carbon investments and Stern's ``early strong emissions cut'', the...

assessing the decreasing role of geographical distance (as a result of globalisation) in the world economy spatial econometric techniquesDecreasing role of distance increasing importance of financial openness as channel of spillovers aross countries

Ageing societies influence the development of industrialised countries. A changing age composition of the population not only affects pension and social security systems but also infrastructure, housing market, available workforce and consumption pattern. Though the process proceeds only slowly,...

This paper explores the capacity of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models to track down policy induced economic changes and their ability to generate contrastable data for an economy. Starting from an empirically built regional Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), a first stage CGE calibrated...