Environment

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.

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.

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.

What ails the EU Green Deal is exactly what troubles the Union in general — an absence of social democracy at work

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

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’.

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

How free electricity could fight climate change and inequality

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

John Kenneth Galbraith noted in 1973 that establishment economics had become the “invaluable ally of those whose exercise of power depends on an acquiescent public.” If anything, economists’ embrace of that role has grown stronger since then.

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

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.

Hope for mitigating climate catastrophe may not be lost, but the scale of political change needed is no cause for optimism

A response to economists who doubt our capacity to decarbonize while maintaining robust growth

Market tweaks and incentives won’t save us from climate catastrophe. Only radical policy change will.

The new IPCC Report is overly optimistic about global productivity growth and fossil fuel energy use. More dramatic, immediate action is needed

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.

A new report shows an economically viable path to net-zero CO2 emissions in key industries by 2060

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’.

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 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.

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

For the BRICS countries to not just grow their economies but also raise the standard of living of their people, inclusive growth that prioritizes poverty reduction is a must

The BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—play a crucial and growing role in the world economy. Sanjay Reddy kicks off our series exploring shifting social and economic dynamics within these countries, and what they mean for the global economy.    

In the face of  laissez-faire capitalism at home and resurgent nationalism across the globe, INET offers an innovative look at the causes of—and solutions for—the problems that ail a fissuring world economy.

China is now the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, accounting for over 25% of the global total. But the country has also demonstrated a growing understanding that a truly green economy promises to improve quality of life and create enormous opportunities for technological and political leadership.

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.

Two years after the 2015 Paris Agreement, where we stand today is better than you may think 

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

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

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

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

Climate Change and Denial

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

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

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

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. 

Faced with rapid cost reductions for clean electricity generation, some commentators suggest that we no longer need the Paris agreement or other policy interventions, because technology alone can solve all problems.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord sets the US economy back

YSI Working Groups are cooperating with Dimensions of Poverty conference

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

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.

The energy transition is happening. But the pace of change depends on a range of technical, business, and societal factors.

Eurocentric modernism has unhinged us from our human nature, argues Rajani Kanth in his new book

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

The practical question in Washington today is not whether regulations will go, but whether anything will replace them

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.

Notes from the Institute’s Director of Research on some significant papers and contributions produced in 2016 under the INET rubric 

In the 40th anniversary year of John Kenneth Galbraith’s Age of Uncertainty, the 1970s look remarkably stable in comparison with today’s turbulent world 

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. 

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.

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

Institute grantee Boyce cited for integrating ‘ecological, developmental and justice-oriented approaches’ into economics

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.

China is drowning in it. The whole world has too much of it. History suggests: This won’t end well.

Estimated space requirements for solar energy sufficient to power the entire world are reassuringly trivial, at 0.5-1% of global land area. For individual countries however, the challenges vary greatly, reflecting dramatic differences in population density.

We are grateful to Michael Grubb, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Igor Bashmakov, and Richard Wood for their interesting, empirically rich and structurally insightful commentary on our paper on the production-based and the consumption-based Carbon Kuznets Curve (CKC).

A comment on Goher-Ur-Rehman Mir and Servaas Storm’s Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth: Production Based vs Consumption-Based Evidence on Decoupling

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.

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).

A stark warning from Institute researchers on the probability that ‘2°C capital stock’ will be reached in 2017

The tragic crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents have been poisoned by lead contamination, is not just about drinking water. And it’s not just about Flint. It’s about race and class, and the stark contradiction between the American dream of equal rights and opportunity for all and the American nightmare of metastasizing inequality of wealth and power.

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

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?

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.

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

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has awarded $2 million in grants to fund 21 different projects as part of the latest round of its research grant program.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”

Can China lead the way on innovation?

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.

Where will today’s innovation come from?