Environment

Chaired by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence, INET has assembled a global team of leaders and scholars calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

This research project discovers how real people, not just the abstractions of traditional economic theory, respond to various possible policy interventions aimed to bring climate change under control and thus which policies will have the biggest impact.

This research project proposes linking emission fees to actual temperatures, thereby helping to break the policy stalemate and reach agreement on an effective policy.

This research project traces the history of German energy policy from 1945 to the present. It explores the political economy behind Germany’s transition from coal, to oil, to green energy, the crises driving these shifts, and the evolving efforts to balance affordability with security and environmental protection.

This research project investigates the air quality co-benefits of climate policy. Reduced burning of fossil fuels curbs not only CO2 emissions but also emissions of hazardous co-pollutants, such as particulate matter. The extent of air quality co-benefits relative to CO2 reduction varies across regions and pollution sources, and hence the distribution of emissions reductions matters for both efficiency and equity.

This research project analyses the possibility of achieving economic and financial stability, high employment, and good social outcomes, in the presence of clearly defined resource and environmental limits, even if these mean some limits to economic growth.

This research project explores the relationship between environmental regulation, innovation, and competitiveness through a meta-analysis, which extracts key implications for economic thinking and future research, and unique datasets on patented “environmental” inventions.

This research project develops a comprehensive research agenda to formulate proposals that will help make the financial sector sustainable and facilitate a transition to sustainable economic development.

This research project explores the implications for the economics of gender stereotypes that consider self-interested economic behavior and risk-taking to be masculine and care and caution to be feminine.

Climate Change and Denial

A discussion with Michael Grubb, INET Grantee and Professor of Energy and Climate Change at University College of London.

What Do Citations Actually Measure in Economics and How Should Economic Journals and Department Review Committees Use This Data? 

The Implications of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative for China and the World Economy

A discussion featuring Kenneth Smith, Head of the Trade and NAFTA Office of the Ministry of the Economy of Mexico, and Jay Pelosky, Principal of Pelosky Global Strategies.

A conversation with Richard Vague, Managing Partner at Gabriel Investments and Chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation.

A conversation with Isaac Stone Fish, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for U.S. – China Relations and Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

Evidence of climate change is widely accepted by scientists.

How can we distribute growth globally when the developed world needs growth to emerge from debt overhangs and inequality between nations is still quite formidable?

The developed economies of Europe, North America, and Japan are facing tremendous challenges related to indebtedness and stagnation. How will the developing economies of Asia respond to this challenge as they reorient their growth strategies to meet the rising aspirations oftheir people?

The Foundations of Economic Prosperity: The Lessons of Innovation Process and History

Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and a global team of leading thinkers are calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its sixth Annual Conference from April 8 to April 11, 2015, in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

The Institute joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in hosting its third-annual plenary conference in Berlin from April 12-15, 2012.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking convened many of the world’s most distinguished economists, academics and thought leaders at its inaugural Conference at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking held its annual plenary conference in Hong Kong from April 4-7, 2013 at the InterContinental Hotel in Kowloon. The event discussed Asia’s emergence in the global economy and other core issues.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking joined the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in holding its fifth Annual Conference from April 10 to April 12, 2014 in Toronto.

Every nation faces the challenge of imagining what a good life means. Sound nutrition, shelter, health care, personal safety, social stability, security of savings, clean air and water, and the development of children are among the elements of what many envision as vital to a happy and healthy society.

Join us for a reception at the ASSA conference in San Francisco

The Advanced Graduate Workshop in Development, led by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is interested in identifying the complex interactions that influence well-being, development and growth.

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in collaboration with the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are organizing India’s first “Law Economic Policy Conference (LPEC 2016)”. The aim is to bring together economic, legal and policy thinkers together to consider policy issues in a holistic manner.

A reference guide to all Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) community presentations at the Eastern Economic Association’s (EEA) 2017 annual meeting

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

INET gathered hundreds of new economic thinkers in Edinburgh to discuss the past, present, and future of the economics profession.

The YSI Working Group on Economic Development, the Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre (GPERC) of the University of Greenwich, and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) would like to invite you to a talk by Professor Tim Jackson. 

YSI Working Groups are cooperating with Dimensions of Poverty conference

The Festival for New Economic Thinking is a collaborative initiative of several organizations, and aims to bring together those who seek to improve how economics is taught, studied and practiced. 

The Latin America Working Group and the Keynesian Economic Working Group of the Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) of the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) are hosting the workshop “Technology, Globalization and the Environment: Latin American Development in the XXI Century” to be held at the headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC) in Santiago de Chile on the 23-24 July 2018.

Young Scholars based in Africa are invited to convene in Harare, Zimbabwe. The event serves to strengthen the African network of new economic thinkers pursuing a new economic paradigm. Attendees will be able to attend the annual conference of the Zimbabwe Historical Association in the same trip.

The YSI Economics of Innovation, Economic Development and Africa Working Groups, in partnership with Global Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence Building Systems (GLOBELICS), Globelics Alumni, are organizing the 1st GLOBELICS Pre-Conference for Young Scholars entitled ‘Financing of Innovation and Infrastructure for Development’.

Please join us for a discussion with Geoff Mann, INET Senior Fellow and author of Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, on how the coronavirus pandemic might (or might not) teach us to prepare for a life on an increasingly hot planet.

Global carbon emissions could fall by an estimated 5.5% in 2020 as a result of declining industrial production in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But if the change is not systemic these effects may be fleeting, and the changing climate could put hundreds of millions of lives, trillions of dollars of economic activity, and the world’s physical and natural capital at risk.

The Nobel laureate economist discusses how an activist government is needed to tackle problems like climate change

Economist James K. Boyce argues that the distribution of carbon tax revenue is just as important as the price itself

Ocean expert Peter Neill says the watery depths hold solutions to earth’s most pressing challenges

Smick argues that distortions of capitalism have fed populist rebellion, and that reviving a capitalism that offers opportunity for average people to increase their earnings is an urgent priority if America’s political economy is to be stabilized.

Repression in China today is at its most severe point since the aftermath of 1989. David Wu discusses the tensions inherent in a one-party state which is struggling to aspire toward a more predictable rule of law.

Will environmental limits, including limits on the climate system, slow or even halt economic growth? If not, how will the nature of economic growth have to shift?

How well do our assumptions about the global challenges of energy, environment and economic development fit the facts?

Is moving away from coal and into shale - rather than directly into renewables - a worthy move from an economic as well as environmental point of view?

Economists have gone to great lengths to write humans out of economics, pushing self-interest and generally providing two choices—faith in markets or the state.

Wishful thinking and tinkering won’t cut it. Nothing short of a mass mobilization for deep de-carbonization across the global economy can avert the looming climate catastrophe.

The path to holding fossil fuel producers accountable for climate change & climate damages 

What economics can – and can’t – tell us about climate change 

In this paper we provide a summary and a guide to the literature for a new line of research which goes under the name of Economic Complexity and is partly performed incollaboration with INET.

There are a number of possible purposes in assessing the level of economic development of a country or part of a country. The assessment may provide an incentive for better development, particularly if it can be compared meaningfully with assessments for other countries.

The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.

The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.

People adopt diverse measures to protect from contagion. I propose a taxonomy of protection technologies, and present a model to study the implications of the technology on the prevalence of infections and on welfare at different levels of exposure.

Using data on industrial air pollution exposure in the United States, we compute three measures of environmental inequality: the Gini coefficient of exposure, the ratio of median exposure of minorities to that of non-Hispanic whites, and the ratio of median exposure of poor households to that of nonpoor households.

We assess the Carbon-Kuznets-Curve hypothesis using internationally consistent and comparable production-based versus consumption-based CO2 emissions data for 40 countries (and 35 industries) during 1995-2007 from the World Input Output Database (WIOD).

While a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that women are more risk averse than men, this conclusion merits reconsideration.

Would having more women in leadership have prevented the financial crisis?

Many public debates about climate change now focus on the economic “costs” of taking action.

Contemporary mainstream economics has widely “poisoned the well” from which people get their ideas about the relationship between economics and ethics.

Our shared concern – 20 years after Rio, yet poor progress towards wellbeing

Globalization has improved the living standards of hundreds of millions of people – but growing resource scarcity means it risks becoming a victim of its own success.

All cultural narratives, worldviews, religious doctrines, political ideologies, and academic paradigms are ‘social constructs.’

Many models of economic growth exclude materials from the production function. Growing environmental pressures and resource prices suggest that this may be increasingly inappropriate.

The present paradox, as ecological economist Bill Rees is fond of putting it, is simple yet profoundly troubling: “The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible, but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.”

Three major crises are confronting the world. The first is the increasing and uneven burden of humans on the biosphere, and the observation that we have already surpassed the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity with respect to three planetary boundaries: climate change, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss.

In “The Ambivalence of Scarcity” which is my contribution to L’Enfer des choses. René Girard et la logique de l’économie, written by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and originally published in French in 1978, I attempt to apply mimetic theory to modern economics and to economicphenomena, and also to explain why economic issues and economics as a discipline occupy such an important place in the modern world.

Healthy innovation economies are the main driver of prosperity in the 21st century. But the three players that have traditionally sponsored basic research and invention in those economies are no longer willing or able to perform that role.

A striking feature of the neoclassical economic theory which has been dominant in Western universities in recent years is that it has had so little to say about innovation and innovation policy which is useful for policy-makers.

It would be nonsensical to blame economists for not foreseeing the crisis; even less for causing it. It was obvious there would be a crisis. It was impossible to foresee how it would start and evolve, and at what moment these events would occur.

The problem of value has always occupied a central place in economic thought and debate.

Innovation is essential to economic growth. However, it appears that the ways in which we pursue innovation policies have aggravated inequality. Inequality is an increasingly contentious political issue in both wealthy and emerging economies.

We provide an explanation for the large spatial wage disparities and low male migration in India based on the trade-off between consumption-smoothing, provided by caste-based rural insurance networks, and the income-gains from migration.

This paper discusses the main issues about increasing inequality, whether it matters and its impact on economic activity and growth. It starts by briefly considering the empirical evidence of the share of income going to the top one percent since 1945 in the advanced countries. It then considers whether this represents an increase in the productivity of the top one percent or merely an extraction of economic rent.

Can China lead the way on innovation?

We conclude that representing dynamic realism in such models is as important as – and far more empirically tractable than – continued debate about the monetization of climate damages and ‘social cost of carbon’.

This paper considers the ambition, scale, substance and strategy of the European Union’s Green Deal

Freeing ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels is not only good for the planet and future generations. It also saves lives here and now, not just in the far future.

How models treat innovation may be just as important as their assumptions about climate damages

Inadequate demand and climate change require a global green new deal

By promoting unrealisitc models, economists have become part of problem rather than the solution