The twenty-first century is characterized by an underprovision of basic public goods, such as public health, education, infrastructure and so on, and an overuse of the atmosphere as disposal space for greenhouse gases. Carbon pricing could address both problems simultaneously: a transition from negative carbon prices (fossil fuel subsidies) to positive levels could generate revenues to finance progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Given the scarcity of private sources of finance in many lower-income countries, carbon pricing could be a particularly attractive policy option.

Even though concerns about adverse distributional implications for the poor are one of the most important political challenges for carbon pricing, the existing literature reveals ambiguous results. For this reason, we assess the expected incidence of moderate carbon price increases for different income groups in 87 mostly low- and middle-income countries. Building on a consistent dataset and method, we find that for countries with per capita incomes of below USD 15,000 per year (at PPP-adjusted 2011 USD) carbon pricing has, on average, progressive distributional effects.

A global uniform carbon price would be economically efficient and at the same time avoid ‘carbon-leakage’. Still, it will affect the competitiveness of specific industries, economic activity and employment across countries. This paper assesses short-term economic shocks following the introduction of a global carbon price that would be in line with the Paris Agreement. Based on the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), we trace the carbon content of final output through global supply chains.

Different energy sources have different spillovers on economic development and industrialization. Pathways of economic development based on renewable energy sources might require additional policies to support industrial development.

In this article, we estimate both the economic value of water and own-price and cross-price elasticities of water for the Chilean manufacturing industry using the production function approach. Estimating the production function allows us to estimate the marginal productivity of water which corresponds to its economic value. Our estimations are based on panel data obtained from the National Industrial Survey for the period 1995–2014, accounting for more than 10,000 industrial plants.