Building Back Better: How Big Are Green Spending Multipliers?
Author | : International Monetary Fund |
Publisher | : International Monetary Fund |
Total Pages | : 47 |
Release | : 2021-03-19 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781513574462 |
ISBN-13 | : 1513574469 |
Rating | : 4/5 (62 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: This paper provides estimates of output multipliers for spending in clean energy and biodiversity conservation, as well as for spending on non-ecofriendly energy and land use activities. Using a new international dataset, we find that every dollar spent on key carbon-neutral or carbon-sink activities can generate more than a dollar’s worth of economic activity. Although not all green and non-ecofriendly expenditures in the dataset are strictly comparable due to data limitations, estimated multipliers associated with spending on renewable and fossil fuel energy investment are comparable, and the former (1.1-1.5) are larger than the latter (0.5-0.6) with over 90 percent probability. These findings survive several robustness checks and lend support to bottom-up analyses arguing that stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss are not at odds with continuing economic advances.