Spatial Policies for the Environment and Equal Development

During the past decades, the connection between the economy and the climate came to the center of attention.

However, while scholars and policymakers have been questioning the sustainability of the global economy, many factors have been limiting the design and implementation of coordinated worldwide mitigating policies.

Therefore, the predictions for potential impacts on the world economy, and especially on low-income countries, are not optimistic.In this context, developed economies are designing and implementing, unilaterally, stricter environmental policies, like the European Green Deal (EGD): a set of transformative policies for the European Union (EU) to ensure net-zero emissions in the EU while leaving no person and place behind.

These spatial policies - i.e., implemented in the EU and not elsewhere - are ambitious but risky, due to interactions with a less stringent rest of the world (e.g., taxing emissions forcing energy-intense industries to reallocate out of the EU).

How can the interaction of these environmental policies, between them and with the rest of the world, affect the EUs transition to a net-zero emission, growing economy?

How to assure that such a process entails equal economic development within the EU and worldwide?The SPEED project - Spatial Policies for the Environment and Equal Development - will answer these questions.

For that, it will start by building the ideal theoretical grounds with state-of-the-art spatial economic models capable of accommodating a wide range of spatial policies.

Then, by combining these models with novel, high-resolution spatial datasets, it will perform counterfactual policy experiments that will showcase the efficiency of (and the underlying economic mechanisms behind) these policies.

This hybrid theory-empirics approach will provide well-founded and carefully quantified answers to the proposed questions, informing policymakers about the trade-offs behind spatial policies like EGDs.