Lekha Chakraborty
(Professor, NIPFP, and Member of Governing Board, International Institute of Public Finance, Munich)

Climate change is about risks and uncertainty. How well the monetary policy stance can incorporate such risks and uncertainties is questioned by many economists. There is a broad consensus among economists that fiscal policy is capable of dealing with the climate crisis but monetary policy is not, due to the latter’s lack of tools. It is widely acknowledged that public finance commitments are essential to lowering carbon emissions. Public finance interventions—through taxation to reduce carbon prints or through public expenditure to support green energy and technology—have proven to be effective in reducing emissions. However, such empirical evidence is absent in the case of monetary policy.

India was the first to integrate a climate change criterion in its inter-governmental fiscal transfers. The macroeconomic policy channel of these “ecological fiscal transfers” works through the prioritization of public expenditure on climate change commitments by subnational governments, to make a “just transition” towards a sustainable climate-resilient economy. continue reading…

Pavlina Tcherneva recently participated in a hearing before a parliamentary group (La France insoumise) of France’s National Assembly on the subject of the Green New Deal and the job guarantee (the intro is in French; Tcherneva’s testimony is in English):