Post by bhushraislam145 on Mar 4, 2024 8:02:30 GMT 1
Economy and environment cannot go separate ways if what we pursue is sustainable development. The premise is proven time and time again when we look at the profitability of corporate social responsibility and the high cost the planet has paid in the absence of sustainable business models. Winning the battle against climate change is essential for the conservation of our planet. However, victory is impossible without the participation of the various economic actors. This year's Nobel Prize in Economics recognizes this by including among the winners an American who has made great contributions in this field. Americans William D. Nordhaus and Paul M. Romer have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics. The first for integrating climate change into economic analysis by determining the costs and benefits of reducing polluting emissions. And the second for doing the same but with technological innovations, explaining what makes an economy innovate and, therefore, grow more than others. "Their findings have significantly expanded the scope of economic analysis by building models that explain how the market economy interacts with nature and knowledge," highlighted the Swedish academy. William D. Nordhaus, born in 1941 in Albuquerque (United States), is a professor at Yale University.
His main contribution consists of creating economic models that also integrate climate change, the damage it causes and the corrective policies that can be used. In Nordhaus's opinion, economic agents do not pay a price for carbon emissions. So he is in favor of correcting these so-called negative externalities by applying carbon taxes globally. "Governments, companies and households pay practically Europe Cell Phone Number List nothing today," he said this year when receiving the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge award. His research allows us to put a price on emissions. Doing so would lead to more investment in other technologies such as renewables, says Nordhaus. In the mid-1990s, he became the first person to create an integrated assessment model on climate change that includes population growth, how carbon dioxide is concentrated, how it affects global temperature, the effects of responses with different policies such as the carbon tax and the evolution of the damage caused. "Its quantitative model describes the global interaction between the economy and climate and integrates theories and empirical results from physics, chemistry and economics," says the award statement. “The Nordhaus model is now widely used and used to simulate how the economy and climate evolve together.
It is used to examine the consequences of climate policy interventions, for example carbon taxes,” he adds. Paul M. Romer, born in 1955 in Denver (United States), is a professor at the NYU Stern business school and former chief economist of the World Bank. As explained by the Bank of Sweden, Romer demonstrates how knowledge can function as an engine of long-term economic growth. Until Romer's studies, the technological progress that drives economic growth was a kind of black box about which nothing was known. In the economists' models it was like manna fallen from the sky, an exogenous and unpredictable element. However, Romer proves that technological progress is something that occurs in a market economy and that there is a context in which it can be encouraged. While growth based on the accumulation of productive factors has diminishing returns, growth based on ideas and innovations is sustainable in the long term and can happen in two ways: either a company can have a sufficiently monopolistic position to be able to recover the costs of innovating. Hence, the balanced use of patents to promote innovation is justified.