Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2408.14359

The Climate Cost of Climate Investment: A Two-Period Perspective

Abstract

A one-size-fits-all paradigm that only adapts the scale and immediate outcome of climate investment to economic circumstances will provide a short-lived, economically inadequate response to climate issues; given the limited resources allocated to green finance, it stands to reason that the shortcomings of this will be exacerbated by the fact that it comes at the cost of long-term, self-perpetuating, systemic solutions. Financial commitments that do not consider the capital structure of green finance in an economy will cumulatively dis-aggregate the economic cost of climate investment, to erode the competitive advantage of the most innovative economies, while simultaneously imposing the greatest financial burden on economies that are most vulnerable to the impact of climate change; such disaggregation will also leave 'middle' economies in a state of flux - honouring similar financial commitments to vulnerable or highly developed peers, but unable to generate comparable return, yet sufficiently insulated from the impact of extreme climate phenomena to not organically develop solutions. In the face of these changing realities, green innovation needs to expand beyond technology and address systemic inefficiencies - lack of clear responsibility, ambiguously defined commitments, and inadequate checks & balances to name a few. Clever application of financial engineering demonstrates promise, and simple measures like carbon-credit exchanges have been effective in mitigating imperfections at the grassroots level. We believe that information- and incentive-centric systemic advancements can usher a fresh wave of green innovation that stands on the shoulders of giants to ensure effective implementation of technological breakthroughs; economic development that will create an international community equipped with a robust framework to deal with long-term crises in a strategic manner.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Shaunak Kulkarni, Rohan Ajay Dubey. 2024-08-26. The Climate Cost of Climate Investment: A Two-Period Perspective. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14359

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Local Media and the Shaping of Social Norms: Evidence from the Ebola outbreak

Media's influence on norms and behavior is widely recognized. Less is known about the role played by media being local. I examine this in a high-stakes context, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. I exploit quasi-random variation in access to radio and the timing of a public-health campaign aired on community radio. I find that 12-17% of Ebola cases could have been prevented if places with access to a neighboring community radio station had instead had their own. Impacts are driven by radio being local rather than by ethno-linguistic belonging. Local media facilitates coordination in behaviors observed and sanctioned locally.

econ.GN

Productivity Shocks and Input Misallocation: A Decomposition

This paper asks how much input misallocation productivity uncertainty generates and at which stage of input decisions it arises. I separate revenue productivity by when each component is revealed and trace each into the gap between an input's marginal revenue product and its price. In six European countries, shocks revealed after an input is committed account for 20 percent of capital gap dispersion and 5 percent of labor gap dispersion. An unanticipated one percent rise in productivity raises the capital gap by 0.92 percent and the labor gap by 0.19 percent, because most of the shock passes into the wage.

econ.GN

When Do Type-Specific Wages Buffer Distributional Incidence in TANK?

When do relative wages buffer the unequal incidence of aggregate shocks? I derive a consumption-gap decomposition and a present-value condition for partial offset in a TANK model. An extension separates wage-setting demand elasticity from substitution between labor segments and allows each segment to contain both financial types. With a zero inherited wage gap and a same-sign discounted wedge, substitution above one gives offsetting earnings reallocation; substitution below one gives amplification. The channel disappears when financial types have identical segment exposure. Numerical experiments assess these mechanisms, shock persistence, policy feedback, and aggregate-IRF matching. In the nested perfect-alignment monetary benchmark, the peak consumption gap is about two-fifths smaller under type-specific wages than under the common-wage closure. These are conditional model comparisons, not empirical effect estimates or welfare rankings.

econ.GN