SPECIAL SEMINAR: "Alternatives to Green Growth: The EUROGREEN Model as a Tool for Policy Design" by Simone D'Alessandro

SPECIAL SEMINAR: "Alternatives to Green Growth: The EUROGREEN Model as a Tool for Policy Design"

Speaker: Simone D'Alessandro, University of Pisa

Date: Thursday, 29th November 2018

Time: 14 h

Venue: Room Z/022 ICTA-UAB

 

Climate change and increasing inequality have emerged as twin threats to contemporary standards of living, peace, and democracy. A wide range of public policies, from basic income programs to radical decarbonization plans - usually as bold and massive as the challenges they aim to overcome - have been proposed, questioned, and not rarely deemed economically and politically unfeasible. Using the EUROGREEN model, i.e. a system dynamics ecological macroeconomics model calibrated for the French economy, we project the impact of the main alternative policies and policy mixes discussed in the Ecological Macroeconomics literature. Some of the features modelled in EUROGREEN, such as endogenous technological change, dynamic input-output production structure and heterogeneous agents allow us to dwell on the trade-offs between greenhouse gas emissions and income inequality. The simulated scenarios suggest there are alternative routes to environmental sustainability with radically different social consequences with respect to green growth. There are also substantial trade-offs between employment, inequality, and GHG emissions which require the design of fine-tuned policy-mixes to achieve environmental sustainability with social equity. From a theoretical perspective, we focus on the relation between employment and labour productivity and that between functional income distribution and GDP growth arguing that many of the expected relations between these variables dot not seem to hold in a policy-driven economy. 

Co-authors: André Cieplinski, Tiziano Distefano, Kristofer Dittmer

Simone D’Alessandro is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Pisa. He received the Master and PhD degrees in Economics at the University of Siena (2007). He is member of the board of the Tuscany Doctoral Programme in Economics, and leads the focus area in Societal Transition for a Sustainable Economy in the REMARC lab (remarc.ec.unipi.it). Simone’s research interests involve distribution of income and wealth, development economics, behavioural economics, ecological economics, ecological sustainability and degrowth. Work in recent years is focused on the socio-economic effects of policies to promote the transition towards sustainability. Simone’s contributions are published in journals, such as, among the others, B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, Ecological Economics, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Exploration in Economic History, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Journal of Economic Inequality, Metroeconomica, Oxford Economic Papers.