Keyword: Green growth
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Keyword: Green growth
Green Growth means sustainable development from the environmental point of view. While progress has been made, many would say that the outcome was not up to the expectations. Now, with the COVID-19 crisis, the green growth concept is again high on the agenda in the context of the recovery policies. What have we learned during the past decade? How can we use this knowledge in policy making? What else do we need to know?
good morning and welcome to all of you to the ones who are here in person and to the ones who are connected remotely i wish you a lovely sunday we're here in trenton this beautiful museum my name is maria luigi signiana the department of economics and management and i'm here to spend a few introductory words on our speaker today as well as on the context he works in but let's start straight away with our guest today we have here with us although he is in paris thomas koslok hello thomas i know that my pronunciation of a polish name is certainly faulty and i hope thomas will forgive me it is a pleasure to have you with us and i would like to briefly describe your scientific profile as well as your numerous contributions to the topic we're debating here today thomas has a degree obtained at the european institute in florence and he's worked on a wide range of issues from competition and competitiveness policies to energy policies to public investments approximately 10 years ago however he started focusing on green growth and environmental economy his main focus as the effect of environmental policy on companies as well as the interaction and connection between environmental policy and the different agenda for structural reform in the different countries i would like to stress that he has been head of the group going for growth and green growth at the department of economics of oecd so this is just to give you an idea of what he's done in the last 10 years for sure he has contributed with many scientific publications to the international debate publishing in top level scientific magazines right now thomas is focusing on transition transition towards a low carbon emission economy so i believe he deserves all our attention given the theoretical and applied research he has carried out in the last 10 years let me conclude by briefly hinting to the context of his work in 2009 the oecd countries made an official declaration about green growth in 2015 the ecd published a very important report with the title towards green growth question mark which is very important for monitoring the situation and in the same year in 2015 the united nations proposed their 2030 agenda of sustainable development in 2019-2020 the oact has been publishing the work on green growth which is the meeting point of three different pathways if we focus on the key word we're addressing here today green growth these three pathways are growth in productivity grain growth and inclusive growth so three pathways that together with the data that were included in the report i mentioned measure the distance of the different countries and not the different measures from the targets of the united nations in their agenda for development for sustainable development right without further ado i would like to leave the floor to thomas because we would like to know what he thinks we would like to know how much we actually know today and what we would like to know when we try to conjugate growth policy with environmental policy for sure this is a challenge also given the fact that if you think about the term growth well several economists who have investigated and studied growth in the last 40 years both theoretically and practically have referred to the concept of growth claiming that it is still a mystery a mystery that is not being understood yet ever since adam smith right with this i would like to leave the floor to thomash um we ask you in 30 minutes i know this might be a mission impossible but we ask you to summarize for us the state of the art our knowledge and what we would like to know in the future thank you very much thomas you have the floor i hope you can hear me well so hello and good morning everybody it's first of all my duty to really thank the organizers for inviting me to such a fascinating event to speak to you in the amazing city of toronto my my only and big regret is that i can't actually physically be there uh thank you very much also to to maria for uh for introducing me also for setting uh you know the expectation is very high i will try to at least deliver on some of the the things you you mentioned but uh indeed my adventure with green growth and with uh environmental economics has started more or less ten years ago uh and i always find a good idea to you know to maybe start with what what we are actually talking about so in front of you you have the oec definition of what green growth is i won't read it to you but uh the basic idea is you know we have various definitions there's the ocd definition of green growth there's the eunup green economy there's other organizations with their uh definitions of going of green growth and effectively we're all talking about the same thing i mean we're talking about growth development well-being that is improvements well-being that are environmentally sustainable and i think that's the bottom line right that even if we have slightly different definitions we in the back of our minds we really think about the same thing and so what i want to do today is share with you it's sunday morning right so we have to be uh gentle with with our audience uh and i want to share a couple of thoughts uh about you know a coveted uh related recovery but in particular on micro evidence on green growth especially on the firm level there's also a bulk of evidence on the household level on consumers i won't be talking about that today but focusing on what we know and what we would like to know and how we can use this knowledge in policymaking because that's effectively what matters for us so um let's start yeah basically so to start i i pulled out you know a very crude and simple graph from google trends so google trends allows you to to look at what people have been searching for on the internet and this searches for global searches for the phrase green stimulus and as you see the idea you know was deserved quite a bit of attention uh in the global financial crisis so you have the spike around 2009 where a lot of people were looking for this phrase uh it was the time when you know when the green growth agendas uh started the green growth strategies there was a time when you know there was a lot of hope about uh making the recovery from the global financial crisis better greener environmentally sustainable and as you see uh that is actually dwarfed by the second spike around now it could be because because of covert people are locked down they're googling things much more than previously but there is you know everywhere you turn around you hear politicians policymakers international organizations telling us about the green recovery about tilting the recovery towards green about building up back better so it's clear that there's you know there's a lot of attention to this again so if you look back at historical data this is a very simple graph of co2 emissions at the global level over time the striking thing is that uh frankly in every major crisis emissions went down together with economic activity i mean that's perhaps not surprising but basically as activity picked up emissions went back up again or started growing again so if you zoom in on the global financial crisis as exactly as uh process has said just a moment ago uh this is a time when uh the major international organizations uh have came up with uh their green growth or green economy strategies particularly osd started with the mcm the ministerial in 2009 about the green uh green growth strategy so what can we learn from that basically these are not just declarations because if you look at the recent oc paper that looks very in very much detail at the stimulus the fiscal stimulus that accompanied the recovery that led the recovery from the global financial crisis uh colleagues at the environment department who actually did you know the bean counting for this claim that or found that over 16 percent of the stimulus that was used to recover from the global financial crisis so over half a trillion us dollars were directed at so-called green activities and if you take it at the book that is a lot of money so it's not just declaration there is money behind it but then we look at the historical numbers again and you could say the the outcome was was a bit disappointing yeah because when growth started recovering the the emissions started recovering too and so uh you know that was not so great you know but there were some benefits of of what was going on of the focus on google strategies for instance this is a graph that comes from the international renewable energy agency uh and some other data that i put together from from other sources basically looking at the massive reductions of prices of technologies that are considered crucial for a low carbon transition or for green growth so in principle renewable energy and batteries which over the last decade saw you know enormous amount of reduction costs on the other hand economists have been busy so a colleague of mine helped me pull out this graph it looks at economics articles published that in the title or in the abstract contain the phrase environment and policy so we have actually over the years especially over the past decade built up a wealth of information on environmental policy analysis of course this graphics crude you can refine it much more but it shows you the the picture i mean we we know much more than we used to and we have been working quite a lot on you know on the effects of environmental policies so another area of progress is on the diagnostics and measurement so when the osd issued its screen growth strategy uh that was accompanied with a lot of work a lot of investment into the measurement into the data uh on trying to measure green growth and trying to provide indicators that can track progress on green growth and i i'm not going to show you the the example i'll just show you some examples on what these type of indicators are you can go to the website and play around there's a very nice website to to look at you know your country your interests in this particular area but in three indicators that might be just worth some attention is like we are now able to look at uh carbon productivity not only from the production side so not the productivity of just what we produce but also the predictive of what we consume what we buy what we uh what we demand from other countries so taking into account the carbon content of imported products we also are able to use much better modern uh digital technologies like satellite imageries and earth observation for instance to track pressures on the natural asset base i mean this is an example of tracking over time the change in built up area so the the land cover use in countries or across countries we're also able to track risks to health so we have for instance data on air pollution coming from uh from earth observations overlaid with population data to see what are the shares in countries of people exposed to high levels of air pollution these are just a couple of examples another one is we are much better at tracking policies now so we collect a lot of information on environmental policies which is crucial for evaluation of environmental policy looking at their effects the example you have here is is a composite index that kind of amasses part of this information it's right now being updated so it's relatively old for the moment but this year early next year you should have a new version uh basically looking at the stringency of policies across countries and this is crucial to to collect data and understand data on environmental policies because we need that for the evaluation of policies and turning to that would now focus on a particular aspect of evaluation of policies that's environmental policies and firms and that's partly because that's what i worked on for a while uh so the literature in this area focuses on two two pillars it comes from two pillars one is more related to the fears of uh negative effects of environmental policies and that's basically called the pollution haven hypothesis and on the positive side there's the hopes that are related to the departure hypothesis so to maybe quickly run you through that pollution haven hypothesis that's relatively simple basically if a country goes for more ambitious more stringent environmental policies the idea and the fear is that because pollution intensive activity becomes more expensive uh activity both activity and pollution might move to other countries where the countries will lose out with the country initially introducing the ambitious policy loses out on the positive side uh the words of michael porter management professor from 1991 have become basically the holy grail of environmental economics they come with the idea that through adequate well-designed regulation we can push firms to find cost efficiency say cost efficiency sorry efficiency improvements uh reductions of costs reductions of waste that they were not able to find before for various reasons could be symmetry of information uh and invest into innovation and actually become more competitive as a result of well-designed environmental policies so that's the the two sides of the story and what the researchers do basically in the area of looking at the firm is you know you take an environmental policy it's introduction it's change its presence the variation between countries and you look at the effects on you know how firms how firms perform that can be many things that can be profits productivity that can be entering into markets that can be investment investment abroad innovation export sales employment uh behind all this of course is a very complex uh at the back of our minds we have a very complex set of you know management decisions of uh processes going in the firm rethinking you know what products to do how to design products uh where to where to position them on the market who to hire who to reskill but you know you see the outcomes of that in terms of firm performance so all this literature we did a literature summary in last year basically a big literature review and you know i'm not going to go into the details of this but all the bulk of the the academic literature both of the work that we did in the oecd and then other people did you can summarize it that you know the negative effects of environmental policies are probably smaller than than feared or probably significant smaller than fear so so the negative effects are overstated on aggregate you don't find a lot of you know significant large negative effects and environmental policies unfortunately there's you know it's not that rosy there's winners and losers so some firms gain for instance in the productivity study we did in the past it is the most productive most efficient firms that can make the most out of the environmental policies the firms that uh that struggle they actually might be in a worser situation some firms may fail of course there's a couple of caveats to this literature so uh the policies that are tested are usually relatively small policy in a sense even the introduction of policies perhaps with offsetting measures so it is fairly i guess obvious that if you slam a massive very disruptive policy that will have negative effects and the other thing is that a lot of the research because of data constraints has actually focused on advanced economies uh and perhaps china but overall it's really fair to say that you know the costs seem small and that's you know you would think that's that's really good news right because uh we don't need to fear environmental policies uh they they don't have large negative effects on firms well if you think about it you have to wait a minute right is a small cost really good news and that depends right that depends because small cost is great news if you get a lot of environmental benefits there's a bit of like a cost benefit analysis approach so small costs are really good if you get uh a lot of environmental benefits for that however you start to wonder whether small costs are that great if you know if you get some small environmental benefits out of that but if you get really few or no environmental benefits then small costs are actually bad news because you're paying for something where you're not really getting a lot so the question for researchers basically is how can we know that and the answer is that with the current data it's very hard to say so the option to to try to understand that is to look at environmental effects of environmental policies on economic performance but also on environmental performance of firms and ideally to look at these two jointly however that's not that easy so looking at joint environmental and economic effects needs the right data and both those data on uh economic performance at the micro level as well as on environmental performance on the micro level are actually available they're collected i mean they may not be perfect but they exist but they're very hard to combine and why is that basically because for the economic data they are collected usually at the firm level a firm may have you know may have multiple factories may have warehouses may have office buildings may have cars planes ships whatever and we will see in the statistics or in the data that's available the performance the economic performance of all that together as a firm however for environmental performance data the unit of analysis is usually the plant or the installation that emits certain pollutants yeah and that wouldn't be so bad if it was easy to link these things but it's not that easy because first of all you usually have data for large units large polluting units or large emission units which means that you'll be missing quite a lot also the confidentiality issues issues like you know uh indicators and sorry identifiers and the ability to link uh this data is makes it really difficult actually that's why there haven't been that much attempts to do that so the payoff is actually enormous so if you do manage to do that we can answer questions such as you know which firms are greeting our firm's screening is it small or large firms that are improving their environmental performance at the same time we can ask whether the firms that are greening are actually you know are they getting anything out of it are they becoming more competitive are they losing out and how are they agreeing are they greening by by downsizing and outsourcing so maybe a bit more in the pollution haven hypothesis direction or the greening by investment and innovation and development of new products and that's actually that's very crucial uh so these are the the payoffs you can get for linking this type of data and of course you know people have done it so it's not it's not that doesn't exist i think it's hard but i think it's a very promising area and you have several examples that i wanted to mention i mean statcan has uh has initiatives to link or head initiatives to link uh data from pollution from greenhouse gas emissions and with animal manufacturing service there have been papers using the u.s toxic release inventory that's probably the pioneering papers in this area they've also been papers using emission trade either you ets the emission trading scheme including a paper here at the ocd and some national evaluations where data was available on energy consumption and energy prices so there is a bit of that but it's very limited because of the data so i'm trying to convince it's really worth investing in this type of data and uh still it's fair to say i mean don't get me wrong we know quite a bit we we have learned quite a lot in environmental policies uh but environmental progress in a way or at least in terms of um emissions has been rather limited i showed you the graph on emissions before but basically we have serious international commitments uh but emissions have been on an upward path and we haven't seen that many bold movements and you know the obvious question is why is that yeah and you know we heard professor nordhouse i think two days ago here in toronto talking about the need for a carbon tax at the uc we we couldn't agree more basically this exercise the graph in front of you is based on policy recommendations the uc had issues had issued to countries over the last decade so every two years for about now 50 countries we show an economic survey that's the the flag product of the oce it uh has recommendations on how to make how to achieve more inclusive stronger and more sustainable growth in countries these policy recommendations can you know expand many many areas but in 96 percent of guys it's 40 something countries there has been a recommendation on environmental taxes sometimes it's broader than carbon taxes or energy taxes but basically on ramping up environmental taxation using environmental taxation to uh to direct investment direct behavior in a certain direction so the only two i think countries that were an exception had something that was more focused on fossil fuel subsidies which effectively is the same thing so about pricing carbon pricing emissions pricing environmental externalities better so you know we had that for for practically all the countries due to you know to issue carbon taxes to improve carbon tax environmental taxes we also another exercise we do every two years is going for growth where we focus on uh policy priorities for countries it's more than just recognition it's really what are the priorities to achieve inclusive sustainable strong growth and for a quarter of the countries we have in going for growth we have increased reliance on the roundups of taxation so we have been quite bold on the message i mean these are a couple of headlines from articles i mean oecd has been advocating the carbon tax yet if you look at how you know how emissions are actually taxed emissions are heavily underpriced in countries so this is a work from uh the work from uh effective carbon pricing that's also in the industry where they they look at the effective carbon price translating taxation into the price of carbon and the graph shows that 60 70 percent of emissions in the usd are priced below 30 euros per ton so relatively low price actually quite a few of those are not priced at all and none overseas countries that's even higher so it's obvious that you know while we have been recommending progress on environmental taxation it doesn't seem anybody really wants government taxation maybe it's up to danes recently so you know let's see the immediate question is why is that and the answer is really drastically simple right i mean if you go to a recent paper by two french young french researchers on attitudes to climate change carbon taxation and other climate policies they they did a survey of a representative sample of a french population in early 2019 and there was clear that if you propose them a carbon tax that then gives back the money uh to the population only 10 percent of the french population were for that 70 said no they don't want that and then that was only confirmed with the yellow vest movement and then several other uh uh initiatives so basically people don't want the carbon tax but there are also success cases of carbon tax right and british columbia is probably the most uh and probably overused example but it is a very nice example it's a scheme with full revenue recycling where uh the price of carbon over a bit more over 10 years was ramped up basically for increased for quadrupled over time uh and some recent surveys showed that people you know believe that it hadn't had a negative effect on their incomes and these results seem to be quite uniform across gender age regions in british columbia and political preference so there are ways of making carbon tax acceptable right i mean this may be an exception we we need to ask that question but it seems that it's possible yeah but all the work or most of the work on the other papers that i mentioned on the french tax and some other things also on british columbia points to the perception of unfairness of a carbon tax and i think that's the number one thing that we need to do that we need to tackle we need to understand the exact distributional effects of carbon taxes and of environmental taxation more generally but also the perceptions of these because these two things are not necessarily the same the other thing is you know there is quite a bit of research on the distribution effects and on the perceptions particularly on the perceptions i think there's a question of how easily can we generalize the conclusions so the the french paper i mentioned finds that payback to all french would be the least accepted way of recycling revenues of a french carbon tax there's similar findings on switzerland from another paper a bit older that the swiss would be against income tax rebates these are the two features basically of the the success of the british columbia scheme so you know how easily can we generalize results to other countries or perhaps we need to invest more in cross-country insights and comparable data across countries i think that's that's probably a big thing in that type of literature and maybe to just finalize to leave you with a couple of you know i mean don't get me wrong i think it is obvious that policy making is always under uncertainty and always with limited information we will never know the answer to all questions right but policymakers still need to make decisions but we do know quite a lot and we can use this knowledge in a better covenant 19 recovery and then on the research i think the promising alleys that i mentioned here i think are worth you know thinking about and certainly that we're thinking about is uh the micro data on economic environmental performance or thinking about more than think about we're actually pursuing some of this work cross-country insights on attitudes and perceptions and using new technologies to move the measurement agenda and policymaking so i think i would leave you there thank you again and i think now is the time probably for a discussion maria back to you thank you very much thank you very much for this fascinating and brilliant overview of what we know how much we need to know how much we would like to know and how much probably we don't know so i would like to leave the floor to our audience i understand that there are some questions that they would like to ask our speaker please come to the microphone yes you can remove the mask when you speak into the microphone good morning i am convinced that sustainability and complexity are the two sides of the same coin the analysis of data is one thing but right now from the research that was shown at the beginning i mean this the google search uh leads us to the need for an answer kovid has brought us to the precipice of cows this requires understanding complexity pierre levy said with digitization we have entered the world of collective intelligence the kirkhof claims this is the age of connective intelligence and this last reflection also quoting moran speaking of shared destiny well we have understood that we are all on the same boat the two ways are making complexity alphabetical where the local is myself the individual who has to be aware of what is good and what is bad because if i don't do something starting at individual level i won't get anywhere otherwise all together we can actually build a better world because all the people will be aware and then it will be possible to make complexity more understandable more alphabetical bearing in mind that sustainability and complexity are the two sides of the same coin my question is how can we make complexity understandable and how can we all become literate of complexity because at the moment we are illiterate this is a unique opportunity we have in history to make everybody literate about this complexity thank you any other questions before we give the floor to our speaker for answers thomas if you don't mind we will collect a couple of questions first good morning do you believe that this is an opportunity like in 2009 when 16 of investment was in the field of sustainability do you think we have an even better opportunity now and which recommendations can you give to make sure that these this investment is really profitable for a really sustainable growth thomas would you like to start answering these two questions maybe you can also give us some examples to make us understand things a little bit better yeah there are slightly different questions if i understood correctly especially the first one but uh so maybe i'll start from the second one in a way uh so obviously we are in a horrible crisis we are in a in a crisis that has not only cost a lot of lives and a lot of uh but also a lot of economic is still causing a lot of economic misery and uh so it's in a way it's it's difficult to talk this about an opportunity but uh but yes in a way this is uh a chance to to i mean we have to build back we have to recover our economies we have to uh the policy makers have to do their best to you know to to reinstall growth and uh improve people's lives and this is a chance to make that the chance or actually it's a duty in a way to make that more resilient more environmentally sustainable because we don't want to be caught in a situation where another shock i mean you know researchers have warned us about the the possibility of a global pandemic already quite you know quite a while but we weren't prepared yeah so from the environment point of view you know there's a lot of warnings about environmental issues environmental climate being the top one but i mean there's air pollution there's other things environmental degradation uh that we are being warned about and so it's it's really the moment to you know to think what we can do about that of course that's not easy because uh in the recovery you know the focus will be on creating jobs on putting people back to jobs on improving their incomes in safety nets and a lot of these things are not necessarily green per se on the other hand a lot of the green measures might not be you know delivering uh immediate stimulus results in the short term yeah so it has to be done smartly it has to be done through you know through a good evaluation of the policies through learning from lessons as i said learning from lessons for the global financial crisis but also uh you know resources are limited yeah so we have to prioritize so a crucial thing will be to engage the private sector because uh you know government investment yes there are a lot of funds that will be going into the economy but without the participation of the private sector without the participation also of consumers and their decisions we we won't make it there won't be a business case for green i think fundamentally that's what you have to do we have to think about a business case for for sustainable resilient growth and uh if you go i mean i don't want to you know take too much of your time but if you go uh back to the discussion i think yesterday at 2 30. so you can download that off the website our chief economist lawrence boone was actually thinking about the conditions of making you know of a recovery also the condition of the economic conditions we are in i think she raised quite a lot of the important points that we have on how to make the recovery more resilient more green more environmentally sustainable the main thing is also we are we are still under enormous uncertainty i mean that's what is very different from the previous crisis we still don't know how described how this pandemic will evolve and how our economies will need to be responding it's really about building resilience building in the tools on the labor markets on uh you know firms that will allow us both to support but also to reallocate to uh to more promising more pro-growth channels yeah so more productive growth so yes this is a complex situation it's a situation where we uh we have to operate under enormous uncertainty but there are things we can do uh to the second question i think that very thing is if i understand the question correctly a lot we can do is on information provision on educating consumers uh economic participants also in terms of uh using insights from behavioral economics so things like like nudging how how to uh basically educate people to make the you know to to to take into consideration environmental effects think into conservation environmental externalities and the other thing i guess that is important there is probably international cooperation both at the high level in terms of policies but also in terms of learning from experiences learning from you know what other countries are doing what uh what we can draw from that and uh i know if that answers the the question but i think that's the job of governments of international organizations but also uh ngos that can help well you just referred to the stimulus policies uh so policies which promote certain behaviors for example information campaigns or awareness campaigns other types of policies well i wonder whether these types of policies can really replace more traditional policies policies which either support or reduce the use of certain resources and i wonder whether there are examples from which we can learn that these uh nudging policies have important uh effects uh also for a greener economy and uh um because we know that uh there are issues also perception here i don't know what you think about that because thomas so what do you think about nudging policies uh can you give us also some suggestions so i mean so on the magic policy and you know using behavioral economics more generally i think this is a fascinating field and uh it's i don't think like to take your question i don't think you can substitute that for other policies yeah so it's not an either or i think you need to use the two in combination because sometimes you know responding to to a signal like carbon price maybe difficult because you don't have the full information or you don't understand how that relates to you i think a very kind of simple example is you know labeling of products so basically when i buy a washing machine or a fridge or stuff it's maybe an overused example but i i have no clue how what it would the performance that but i make it an investment that you know that for most households this will last for a couple years and will have enormous imp or significant impacts on my energy consumption but i have no no way of knowing that unless you know there's labeling labeling is there in many countries and i think this is an example of you know how that can impact the environmental performance of a household over the longer term uh things like setting defaults you know default temperatures uh default uh you know uses the the fact that you know maybe your washing machine will turn itself on at a certain time uh after you've programmed when electricity is cheaper that's you know both savings for the households but also lower emissions so uh i think that's you know that's a way to make use of uh the full spectrum of policies and for the ambitious goals we have we have to make a spectrum of the full use of the full spectrum of policies yeah i think the the one question you know that is quite often asked in the context of nudging is how uh how persistent are the impacts how long lasting uh the impacts of nudging and of course that depends on the type of nudging it uh but it's something we have to print in consideration so so if nudging changes behavior for for long term or for forever or for lunch or whether it's something that you know changes a one-off and then we're back to normal so that's a question of policy design and obviously the second question is you know the experiments we do the policy experience we do with nudging are they translatable to situations in other countries in other types of environmental problems and other types of behaviors to what extent can we you know what the external validity of these results i mean to what extent is it robust can we can we use insights from one policy one country one specific experiment or set of specific experience to actually use that in other policy making that's the fundamental question but absolutely it is something that should be used and can be used and can have enormous payoffs in terms of environmental policy and environmental behavior gratitude any other question well i would like to conclude with a one million dollar question i would like to take this opportunity and ask about possible structural reforms in various countries and trying to combine the various structural reforms with the environmental policies well looking at your experience in your opinion what are the avenues or the experiences in order to reconcile environmental objectives and the reduction of inequalities because often we have seen that in order to have environmental results or objectives there is a perception that this may entail effects in terms of new inequalities for example or the use of taxes so how can we reconcile these environmental objectives with the reduction of inequalities i would like to know whether compensation policies are already included in the various reform agendas of the various countries well i realized that it is a one million dollar question but uh i would like to close with a sort of a provocation in order to understand what you think about this challenge so the challenge of combining environmental protection with new inequalities it is a one million dollar question obviously if if it was easy then we would have already been there right and and policy making is also about difficult choices but uh i think fundamentally you know the objective of uh environmental sustainability and uh and improving well-being for everybody or for for everybody in some way so the inequality question is they can't be looked at separately so i think the key there is first of all to to put both inequality policies and uh environmental policies in the mainstream of economic policymaking that said uh i think they're you know environmental policies are not policies to deal with with inequality i mean we have other policies for that but in this uh difficult period and in the recovery will whatever you know whatever happens we have a massive shock to the economy yeah uh we there's going to be a massive reallocation of resources and uh the environmental transition is also about the massive reallocation of resources yeah so in terms of structural policies obviously we have policies to improve the reallocation of resources so uh helping people move to or creating the conditions for the creation of jobs that are more productive that better use technologies that are more environmentally sustainable but obviously reallocation can be costly to to people and then there is a question how what what do you do and how do you prevent increases inequality how do you reduce inequality how do you make give people opportunities to to improve their situation how do you deal with those that don't make the most of these opportunities and that's all about support policies support policies are extremely important in the recovery phase because we are dealing with people who lost their jobs people who lost their their livings in a way uh their incomes and so it's not just about you know reallocation in terms of building a fundamental stronger economy that will uh create the opportunities for you but actually making helping people make the most of out of these opportunities as they're apart from support policies income support and many of the short-term visions it's also about education and skills about uh create preparing the populations for you know the jobs of the future uh and it's not just educational skills in schools it's all through the life lifetime it's also about things like giving people access to digital technologies but also uh you know helping them to use them so i think the it is a complex question and i won't have the answer for you for that i think we're all the time working on how to make policies more green more more environment and sustainable more inclusive uh the the big question is basically you need to look in the context of the country you need to use a wide range of policies for that a wide range of conditions and you need to learn from past successes and past mistakes yeah so uh that's what we do at ucda that's what we try to do we try to use you know uh good and bad examples of what worked and what didn't work in other countries to try to give policy advice that can help both on the inclusiveness on the well on the inclusiveness on the uh environmental and on the the growth and improving incomes front so uh i guess i didn't really answer your question but i gave some of the insights that i think are are important for this you know million dollar question you know future answer let's say okay um the any other question okay thank you so much thomas for this uh brilliant presentation and brilliant provocations i hope that this event has been useful for all of us to understand what we face for the future thank you for being here physically and thanks also to the people are watching us from their computers thank you thomas and bye bye you
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