1887

OECD Economics Department Working Papers

Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.

The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.

English, French

Fighting climate change: International attitudes toward climate policies

Using new surveys on more than 40 000 respondents in twenty countries that account for 72% of global CO2 emissions, we study the understanding of and attitudes toward climate change and climate policies. We show that, across countries, support for climate policies hinges on three key factors: the perceived effectiveness of the policies in reducing emissions, their perceived distributional impacts on lower-income households (inequality concerns), and their own household’s gains and losses. We also show that information that specifically addresses these key concerns can substantially increase the support for climate policies in many countries. Explaining how policies work and who can benefit from them is critical to foster policy support. Simply making people more worried about climate change is not an effective strategy to foster policy support. Furthermore, we identify several socioeconomic and lifestyle factors – most notably education, political leanings, car usage, and availability of public transportation – that are significantly correlated with both policy views and overall reasoning and beliefs about climate policies. Yet, it is difficult to predict beliefs or policy views based on these characteristics only.

English

Keywords: perceptions, experiment, climate change, carbon tax, climate policies, survey
JEL: H23: Public Economics / Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue / Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies; Q58: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Environmental Economics: Government Policy; Q54: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Climate; Natural Disasters and Their Management; Global Warming; D78: Microeconomics / Analysis of Collective Decision-Making / Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation; P48: Economic Systems / Other Economic Systems / Other Economic Systems: Political Economy; Legal Institutions; Property Rights; Natural Resources; Energy; Environment; Regional Studies
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error