Changing the Geography of Emissions and Production through Industrial Policy in Europe
Changing the Geography of Emissions and Production through Industrial Policy in Europe
Recent years have been characterized by overlapping policy challenges: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and resulting energy crisis and increasing geopolitical tension, as well as the escalating climate crisis. Policymakers are responding using industrial policies which overlap and interact with climate policies. Industrial policies not only affect the level of production and emissions in a single country, but also affect their distribution across countries. In a setting like the European Union, where carbon emissions are capped and traded in a single emission trading system, there is an incentive for member states to strategically support their own industry and shift the burden of emissions reductions onto other member states. Industrial policy in a single country that affects energy use of select domestic firms (e.g., an energy tax exemption) has a direct impact on competition within the EU, but it could also affect carbon prices in the ETS and thereby spill over to other EU members and sectors not directly affected by the industrial policy. Individual industrial policies therefore shape the geography of production and emissions within the EU through both a direct and an indirect channel. We ask how industrial policies have shaped the geographic distribution of emissions and production across Europe ex post. To this purpose, we combine structural modelling with empirical analysis.