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Towards Green Growth? - Tracking Progress

Green and Growing, or ripe and rotting? Insights Blog

In a recent lecture on climate change, the Secretary-General stated that “Tomorrow’s societies engineered around yesterday’s solutions won’t get us there.” The OECD’s work on green growth is just one example of where the organisation is working towards the development of solutions for today.

Much better use can and must be made of taxes to help reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, concluded the participants of the 6th Global International Tax Dialogue conference

Taxes are potentially among the most effective ways of cutting pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but they are currently – with very few exceptions – underused; and even where used, they are frequently designed in a sub-optimal way.

Aligning Policies for a Low-carbon Economy

This major report produced in co-operation with the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Transport Forum (ITF) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) identifies the misalignments between climate change objectives and policy and regulatory frameworks across a range of policy domains (investment, taxation, innovation and skills, trade, and adaptation) and activities at the heart of climate policy.

World must weigh the true cost of coal to be serious about climate - OECD’s Gurría

Governments should rethink the role of coal in energy supply as the scale of new investments being made in unabated coal-fired electricity generation poses the most urgent threat to our climate, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said today.

Impacts of Carbon Prices on Indicators of Competitiveness

Concerns around potential losses of competitiveness as a result of unilateral action on carbon pricing are often central for policy makers contemplating the introduction of such instruments. This paper is a review of literature on ex post empirical evaluations of the impacts of carbon prices on indicators of competitiveness as employed in the literature, including employment, output or exports, at different levels of aggregation.

Competitiveness Impacts of the German Electricity Tax

Proposals to increase environmentally related taxes are often challenged on competitiveness grounds. The concern is that value creation in certain sectors might decline domestically if a country introduces environmentally related taxes unilaterally. This paper provides evidence on the short-term competitiveness impacts of the German electricity tax introduced unilaterally in 1999.

6th ITD Global Conference

The International Tax Dialogue (ITD) is organising its 6th global conference at the OECD. This year’s conference will focus on Tax and the Environment, an issue of growing importance and of direct relevance in the lead up to the COP21 meeting taking place later in the year. The ITD is a joint initiative of the EC, IDB, IMF, OECD, World Bank and CIAT.

Measuring environmental innovation using patent data - Environment Working Paper

This paper refines indicators to measure innovation in environment-related technologies, drawing on recent methodological advances that allow a more accurate assessment of environment-related innovation in a broader range of countries. Three indicators are discussed: an indicator of technology development; an indicator of international collaboration in technology development and an indicator of technology diffusion.

Energy taxes misaligned with environmental impacts of energy use

Governments are under-utilising taxation as a tool to curb the environmental consequences of energy use, foregoing revenue and weakening their attack on the principal source of greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change and air pollution, according to new OECD analysis.