Documents Dannenberg, Astrid 4 results

"In the aftermath of the climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 (15th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations), two issues appear to have played a determinant role in the negotiation discourse in protecting the global climate. First, different views on fairness considerations in sharing the burden of the greenhouse gas mitigation costs: Developed countries are historically the main contributors to climate change, while in some newly industrializing economies, notably China, emissions grow at an unprecedented rate. What is a fair way to share the responsibilities among developing and developed countries in the containment of global emissions? In international climate policy, different notions of equity have been proposed supported by different countries. The lack of consensus on equity principles has informed much of the exchanges between the United States and China. These two largest emitters worldwide have managed to stay clear of binding commitments to date. Second, coordination difficulties are displayed by the many participants to the climate negotiations: The Copenhagen Accord has introduced a nonbinding "pledge and review" mechanism where individual countries define voluntary emission reduction targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before 2020. Can this emergent institution prove successful as a first stage to achieve the required global coordination? Against this background, this paper is concerned with the drivers of cooperation among groups of unrelated individuals faced with a coordination game requiring multilateral effort in order to reach a target and avoid losses to all members. Free riding and coordination difficulties are held to be the primary causes of cooperation breakdown among nonrelatives. These thwarting effects are particularly severe in the absence of effective monitoring institutions capable of sanctioning deviant behavior. A growing literature however stresses the importance of non-economic factors in explaining human behavior; therefore, instruments that go beyond the traditional incentives might prove effective in facilitating the task. Given the empirical nature of the problem, we address it by means of a controlled laboratory experiment. To this end, we extend an experiment regarding a framed threshold public goods game with distinctive elements such as inequality and commitment as salient features of the ongoing debate over how best to share the "common but differentiated responsibilities" of climate change. We have built upon the game proposed by Milinski et al. (2008) to explore these further aspects that were not captured by the original design, and that we deem important both at the theoretical and policy level. The experimental results show that the real-world features introduced in the game have deep consequences on the cooperation level. Both claims that the inequality disrupts and the commitments help coordination are supported by the data. Thereby the experiment clearly shows the conditions under which subjects effectively coordinate their efforts to avoid the climate catastrophe: All successful groups agreed on a common equity notion and eliminated inequality while failing groups often disagreed about the reduction of inequality. In that context, the announcement of unbinding targets is particularly helpful to solve the coordination problem."

"Germany still has a generous pay-as-you-go public pension insurance with high effective replacement rates and low effective retirement ages. Nevertheless, through a long reform process that began in 1992, the paradigm of public pension provision has radically changed in response to the country's looming ageing crisis. In a nutshell, the path to improved public pension finances in Germany might be best described as a move from a defined benefit scheme to a defined contribution scheme. After the last major amendment in 2007 that will lift the statutory retirement age to 67 the debate about further pension reform measures basically had come to a stop. The current crisis in the financial sector, however, has brought the pension system in Germany under political pressure again. Against this background, this article provides a synthetic overview of the recent developments in the German pension system and their impact on current and future pension finances. We point to new threats to sustainable public pension finances developing in the wake of the financial crisis: First, pressure to disconnect the annual adjustment of pensions from annual growth of wages, as average wage earnings are predicted to decline. Yet a ban on nominal pension cuts is at odds with the guiding principle of the last pension reforms in Germany, namely to reduce the replacement rate. Second, pressure to moderate the scheduled increase in mandatory retirement age, as employment opportunities are worsening also for older workers. However, it is wrong to adapt the long-term mandatory retirement age reform in view of short-term economic fluctuations. It is designed to unfold very gradually, such that it leaves the actors on the labour market with enough time to adapt to new structural conditions. In the current situation of economic turmoil, the core challenge at present is to protect what has been accomplished with regards to long-term financial sustainability against demands from the public to soften the reforms. Still in the next period of calmer economic waters, pension reformers should tackle pending issues. A first issue is integration of the East and West German public pension schemes. A second, more important issue is provision of pension income for the low-skilled, as the growing second pension pillar does not well reach the poor."

"The Environmental and Resource Economics special issue “Economics of the Environment in the Shadow of Coronavirus” comes at a hugely critical time for environmental economists and policy makers alike. We are in a situation of significant social change, a change that could potentially lay the foundation for mankind's future in the years to come.
As part of this special issue, ERE is trialling a novel, experimental form of article, drawing together short, focussed pieces from a wide group of authors addressing the plethora of issues which such a fundamental challenge as the coronavirus pandemic generates. These provide critical and reflective perspectives on the environmental, socio-economic and policy paths that may be taken in the near and further future—strategies that could lead mankind either on roads to a much more sustainable development, or along paths that could bring about more instability, inequality and further environmental pressures. This innovative article combines short, policy-relevant and less technical papers that deal with specific aspects and provide clear recommendations for policy makers and suggestions for future research alike. The target audiences are policy makers and companies, but also researchers who want quick yet sufficiently detailed knowledge about particular analyses relating to COVID-19 and issues in environmental economics. We hope that the articles contained within this Perspectives collection provide the necessary information for policy makers to take wise decisions for our future, and for researchers the knowledge to help guide policy makers in their decisions..."

"The Paris Agreement on climate change aims to improve cooperation by allowing governments to set their own commitments. Its success hinges on whether governments and investors believe those national commitments. To assess credibility, we interrogate a large novel sample of climate policy elites with decades of experience and well-placed to evaluate whether nations' policy pledges are aligned with what they are politically and administratively able to implement. This expert assessment reveals that countries making the boldest pledges are also making the most credible pledges, contrasting theoretical warnings of a trade-off between ambition and credibility. We find that the quality of national political institutions is the largest explanator of the variation in credibility, and Europe's credibility is exceptionally high. We also find that economic factors, such as the costs and benefits of controlling emissions, are statistically unimportant in explaining the credibility of national pledges to cooperate."