Energy subsidies have wide-ranging economic consequences. While aimed at protecting consumers, subsidies aggravate fiscal imbalances, crowd-out priority public spending, and depress private investment, including in the energy sector. Subsidies also distort resource allocation by encouraging excessive energy consumption, artificially promoting capital-intensive industries, reducing incentives for investment in renewable energy, and accelerating the depletion of natural resources.

The Green Fiscal Policy Network is a joint partnership between UN Environment (UNEP), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) launched in 2011. The Network aims to facilitate knowledge sharing and dialogue on green fiscal policy reforms.

Climatic factors can directly affect economic outcomes such as output, investment and productivity, and understanding the economic consequences of climate change is rapidly becoming a necessity not just for climate economists but also for a wider range of economic professionals involved in modelling and forecasting macroeconomic variables. The focus of this review is on the key theoretical and empirical modelling issues in the analysis of the macroeconomic risks deriving from climate change.

In the first part of the course, economists from the IMF will introduce the definition and measurement of subsidies, and then describe the economic, social, and environmental implications of subsidies. The second part of the course has two principal purposes: first, to review what works best in energy subsidy reform, in light of country experiences globally; and second, to illustrate successes and failures in particular country contexts by summarizing some case studies.

Vivid Economics was commissioned by Defra to review techniques for modelling the macroeconomic impacts of climate change and the role of adaptation in the macro-economy. A theoretical framework is developed to enable policy-makers to succinctly yet robustly understand and evaluate macroeconomic models of climate change and adaptation. The literature is reviewed, including cutting-edge work on General Equilibrium modelling, the interaction of climate change and economic growth and the economics of extreme weather events.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included more than $90 billion in strategic clean energy investments intended to promote job creation and promote deployment of low-carbon technologies. In terms of spending, the clean energy package has been described as the nation’s “biggest energy bill in history.” To provide a preliminary assessment of the Recovery Act’s clean energy package, this paper reviews the rationale, design, and implementation of the act.

On December 18, 2010, Iran increased domestic energy and agricultural prices by up to 20 times, making it the first major oil-exporting country to reduce substantially implicit energy subsidies. This paper reviews the economic and technical issues involved in the planning and early implementation of the reform, including the transfers to households and the public relations campaign that were critical to the success of the reform. It also looks at the reform from a chronological standpoint, in particular in the final phases of the preparation.

This paper provides a set of analytical tools and best practices to help policy makers understand and manage fiscal risks. Rather than seeking to provide an alternative to standard debt sustainability analysis, the paper’s focus is on how countries can assess and manage fiscal risks more broadly—including tail risks—and to better incorporate uncertainty into fiscal policy analysis. The paper is structured as follows. The next section provides an overview of the scale and nature of fiscal risks, based on a comprehensive survey of 80 countries.

International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) (on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) have undertaken a rapid review of INDCs to highlight the countries that are using these tools as part of their INDCs, catalogue the different tools that countries are referencing in their INDCs, identify the frequency of their use and identify trends in how countries are planning to use fiscal instruments to support achievement of INDCs.