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Climate Policy Options: A Comparison of Economic Performance
We use a global computable general equilibrium model to compare the economic performance of alternative climate policies along multiple dimensions, including macroeconomic outcomes, energy prices, and trade competitiveness. Carbon pricing which keeps the aggregate cost lower and preserves better the overall competitiveness than across-the-board regulation is the first-best policy, especially in energy intensive and trade exposed industries. Regulations and feebates are good alternatives in the power sector, where technological substitution is possible. Feed-in subsidies, if used alone, are not cost effective.
Equity and Efficiency Effects of Land Value Taxation
It is a well-known result in economics that land value taxation is efficient since it does not distort the supply of the tax base. Considering only efficiency, land value should thus be fully taxed. Using optimal taxation theory with heterogeneous households, we show that it may be optimal not to tax land value fully for distributional reasons. The decisive variable is the covariance of land value held by households and their social welfare weight. Empirical data from the US and France, however, indicates that ownership of land value (in absolute terms) is negatively correlated to the social welfare weight. Middle income households would pay relatively more land value taxes than high income households, but less in absolute terms. With reasonable revenue recycling, land value taxation would thus reduce the net tax burden of low and middle income earners, because they would benefit more from the recycling than they pay in additional taxes.
Policy Sequencing Towards Carbon Pricing - Empirical Evidence From G20 Economies and Other Major Emitters
Carbon pricing is considered the most efficient policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but it has also been conjectured that other policies need to be implemented first to remove certain economic and political barriers to stringent climate policy. Here, we examine empirical evidence on the the sequence of policy adoption and climate policy portfolios of G20 economies and other major emitters that eventually implemented a national carbon price. We find that all countries adopted carbon pricing late in their instrument sequence after the adoption of (almost) all other instrument types. Furthermore, we find that countries that adopted carbon pricing in a given year had significantly larger c...
Economic and Environmental Benefits from International Cooperation on Climate Policies
This paper discusses and analyzes various international mechanisms to scale up global action on climate mitigation and address the policy gap in this area. Despite the new commitments made at COP 26, there is still an ambition and a policy gap at the global level to keep temperature increases below the 2°C agreed in Paris. Avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change requires an urgent scaling up of climate policies. Recent policy proposals include the idea of common minimum carbon prices, which underlie the IMF’s international carbon price proposal (Parry, Black, and Roaf 2021) and the climate club proposal of the German government. While global carbon prices are not a new idea, the new...
Energy Security and The Green Transition
The current energy crisis has raised important policy questions on how to strengthen short-term energy security while remaining firmly committed to the green transition, a challenge amplified by the recent consensus at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels. This paper examines the historical determinants of the security of energy supply and analyzes the green transition implications for energy security. Looking back, we find that the diversification of energy trade partners, or the lack thereof, was the main factor that underpinned energy security dynamics within and across countries over the last two decades. Looking ahead, the green transition is expected to have a net positive effect on energy security provided investments are aligned to address new challenges posed by the increased reliance on renewables.
Green Innovation and Diffusion
Innovation in low-carbon technologies (LCTs), which is essential in the fight against climate change, has slowed in recent years. This Staff Discussion Note shows that a global climate policy strategy can bolster innovation in, and deployment of, LCTs. Countries that expand their climate policy portfolio exhibit higher (1) climate-change-mitigation-patent filings, (2) LCT trade flows, and (3) “green” foreign direct investment flows. Importantly, boosting innovation in, and deployment of, LCTs yields medium-term growth, which mitigates potential costs from climate policies. This note stresses the importance of international policy coordination and cooperation by showcasing evidence of potential climate policy spillovers.
The International Diffusion of Policies for Climate Change Mitigation
In this paper, we study the international diffusion of carbon pricing policies. In the first part, we empirically examine to what extent the adoption of carbon pricing in a given country can explain the subsequent adoption of the same policy in other countries. In the second part, we quantify the global benefits of policy diffusion in terms of greenhouse gas emission reductions elsewhere. To do so, we combine a large international dataset on carbon pricing with several other datasets. For causal identification, we estimate semi-parametric Cox proportional hazard models. We find robust and statistically significant evidence for policy diffusion.
Getting on Track to Net Zero
To contain global warming to between 2°C and 1.5°C, global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut 25 to 50 percent below 2019 levels by 2030. Even if fully achieved, current country pledges would cut global emissions by just 11 percent. This Note presents illustrative options for closing this ambition gap equitably and discusses their economic impacts across countries. Options exist to accelerate a global just transition in this decade, involving greater emission reductions by high-income countries and climate finance, but further delays in climate action would put 1.5°C beyond reach. Global abatement costs remain low under 2°C-consistent scenarios, with burdens rising with income levels. With efficient policies of carbon pricing with productive revenue use, welfare costs become negative when including domestic environmental co-benefits, before even counting climate benefits. GDP effects from global decarbonization remain uncertain, but modeling suggests they exceed abatement costs especially for carbon-intensive and fossil-fuel-exporting countries. Ratcheting up climate finance can help make global decarbonization efforts more progressive.
External Sector Report 2022
Global current account balances—the overall size of current account deficits and surpluses—continued to widen in 2021 to 3.5 percent of world GDP, and are expected to widen again this year. The IMF’s multilateral approach suggests that global excess balances narrowed to 0.9 percent of world GDP in 2021 compared with 1.2 percent of world GDP in 2020. The pandemic has continued to affect economies’ current account balances unevenly through the travel and transportation sectors as well as a shift from services to goods consumption. Commodity prices recovered from the COVID-19 shock and started rising in 2021 with opposite effects on the external position of exporters and importers, a trend that the war in Ukraine is exacerbating in 2022. The medium-term outlook for global current account balances is a gradual narrowing as the impact of the pandemic fades away, commodity prices normalize, and fiscal consolidation in current account deficit economies progresses. However, this outlook is highly uncertain and subject to several risks. Policies to promote external rebalancing differ with positions and needs of individual economies.
Tax and Technology
The challenges and opportunities of new technologies in the tax field Technological developments induced major reforms in the regulatory international and domestic tax landscapes as well as in the developments in the use of technology by tax administrations and taxpayers. New technology, especially the innovations in virtual asset-light cross-border business organizations, data analytics, service and process automation, on one hand, disrupted the well-established legal tax principles and rules and, on the other, stimulated informed data-driven and structured solutions in tax compliance. Technological advances affected nearly every area and each aspect of taxation: Direct tax regulations, ind...
