Povedomi ekonomu nabira uvedomely trend
‘Something is not working’: Economists urge EU Commission to overhaul its models – Euractivhttps://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/something-is-not-working-economists-urge-eu-commission-to-overhaul-its-models/More than 200 economists called on the European Commission to overhaul the way it calculates its core economic forecasts and better integrate critical environmental factors into its baseline models in an open letter obtained exclusively by Euractiv on Thursday (15 February).
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At present, the Commission – and therefore the EU at large, the group of high-profile economists argued – still relies on models that are strictly informed by general-equilibrium principles that may fail to capture the impact of growing climate-related variables on countries’ economic performance, including increased headwinds of financial and economic instability.
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“I think there’s a growing realisation in the world of macroeconomics that something is not working,” he said.
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“We are in the middle of a climate crisis and need to act rather fast,” she said.
Other independent experts contacted by Euractiv — none of whom were formerly aware of the letter — all supported the call for contemporary forecasting to include the lessons and principles of ecological economics.
Doing this, they added, would improve models’ ability to accurately predict ‘standard’ economic metrics such as inflation and enhance their capacity to measure the environmental impact of government policies.
“They don’t have the right input data [so they] will not get the right output data,” said Kristian Skånberg, an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).
“And as [environmental issues] are becoming increasingly important and there are repercussions from the climate and there are repercussions from shortages, [they] will affect inflation and … GDP,” he added.
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Heather Grabbe, a senior fellow at Bruegel think tank, noted that economic models “have long treated environmental impacts as externalities” and that the way they are constructed tends to create a bias against large-scale green investments.
“Recent research on the macroeconomic impact of climate change and environmental degradation needs to be included in the models used by policymakers,” she said. “They need to include not only the costs of climate action but also the costs of inaction.”
Stefan Sipka, head of the Sustainable Prosperity for Europe programme at the European Policy Centre (EPC) agreed that, when designing economic policies, leaders need to take into account the impact of climate change and other sustainability challenges.
“I would say that our current approach to economics and related modelling is still based on old premises that don’t really take into consideration that we live in a world with limited resources,” he said.