Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt have been jointly awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Joel Mokyr ‘for having explained innovation-driven economic growth’. Aghion and Howitt were cited by the Nobel committee ‘for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction’. As this column explains, their work transformed creative destruction from an evocative […]
Trade and other tensions between the European Union and China should not be allowed to derail joint work to cut emissions. The COP30 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025 , will convene at a moment when the Paris Agreement’s architecture is firmly in place but the politics to deliver it are […]
Corporate climate risk disclosures are costly and often a mere box-ticking exercise. In November 2024, the Omnibus Environmental, Social and Governance Regulation was announced in Europe to consolidate and simplify the phasing-in of corporate sustainability reporting requirements while maintaining strong ESG commitments. This column discusses how leveraging pollution registers can provide an actionable picture of […]
If economic activity is considered the primary driver of climate change through emissions of carbon dioxide, then supporting economic growth and fighting emissions would appear to be at odds. However, the process of economic development may itself foster complementarity between GDP growth and emissions reductions. Such complementary in the relationship between economic development and emissions […]
The ‘green growth’ debate is taking place in an oversimplified setting, largely disregarding the innovation factor. Technologies to mitigate climate change are being treated as given, or as emerging spontaneously, ignoring the fact that the portfolio of technologies available tomorrow depends on what is done today. This can easily lead to misguided preferences, either for […]
Productivity growth has been lacklustre over the past 20 years in most advanced economies. But standard productivity measures ignore the progress that some economies have made in terms of lowering carbon dioxide emissions. This column proposes a method to embed those efficiency gains into existing productivity measures. For traditional (small) estimates of the cost of […]
Policy debates around climate change frequently focus on the trade-off between the near-term costs of reducing carbon emissions and the long-term benefits of mitigating climate change. William Nordhaus highlighted the importance of aggregate productivity losses from climate change in shaping this intertemporal trade-off, but estimating these losses is challenging. This column examines both the direct […]
Different options of what a European architecture for ECAs could look like, and how they could be leveraged to serve European public goods. Export credit agencies (ECAs) play an important role in international trade by providing derisking instruments that function as public assistance to companies engaging in international commerce. As the geopolitical environment has become […]
The United States is seeking to weaken a global deal aimed at helping developing countries struggling with the impacts of climate change and other issues, an internal United Nations document seen by Reuters showed. The Trump administration opposes draft reforms of the world’s financial system intended to help developing countries, including around taxation, credit ratings […]
Adapting to climate change – finding ways to prevent the harshest effects or deal with crises when they occur – is a first-order issue. But research on the economics of adaptation has offered little guidance for policy. This column reviews the existing literature on adaptation and considers how it can more directly inform policy design […]
