Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of this century. Mitigation requires a large-scale transition to a low-carbon economy. This paper provides an overview of the rapidly growing literature on the role of macroeconomic and financial policy tools in enabling this transition. The literature provides a menu of policy tools for mitigation. A key conclusion is that fiscal tools are first in line and central, but can and may need to be complemented by financial and monetary policy instruments.

Fiscal Policies for Paris Climate Strategies - From Principle to Practice provides country-level guidance on the role, and design of, fiscal policies for implementing climate mitigation strategies that countries have submitted for the 2015 Paris Agreement and for addressing vulnerabilities in disaster-prone countries. On the mitigation side, the paper presents a spreadsheet tool for judging the likely impact on emissions, fiscal revenues, local air pollution mortality, and economic welfare impacts of a range of instruments including comprehensive carbon taxes, emissions tradin

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.

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.

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.

Global temperatures have increased at an unprecedented pace in the past 40 years. This paper finds that increases in temperature have uneven macroeconomic effects, with adverse consequences concentrated in countries with hot climates, such as most low-income countries. In these countries, a rise in temperature lowers per capita output, in both the short and medium term, through a wide array of channels: reduced agricultural output, suppressed productivity of workers exposed to heat, slower investment, and poorer health.

This paper responds to the request of G20 Finance Ministers in exploring scaled up finance for climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. In so doing it builds upon and extends the work of last year‘s U.N. Secretary-General‘s High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF). Its starting point is the commitment made in the Copenhagen Accord and Cancun Agreements on the part of developed countries to provide new and additional resources for climate change activities in developing countries.