How can governments tackle climate change while maintaining reasonable economic growth even in the short term? How can they turn on the green innovation machine? This course takes the Climate Change "Grand Challenge" as a case for studying the capacity of advanced as well as developing economies to move their whole economic system towards a green growth path. The notion of Grand Challenges describes societal needs – addressing complex and multi-disciplinary issues – which require the mobilization and allocation of R&D and innovation resources and capacities to some pre-defined areas of knowledge exploration and exploitation (energy, infrastructure, clean technologies). The objective is to review and discuss effectiveness, efficiency and costs of the various economic and technology policy mechanisms that need to be deployed. We will analyze the centrality of economic incentives – taxes and right prices (to reflect future scarcity of goods and thereby induce technical changes); of R&D and innovation and last but not least of the improvement of operational efficiency and diffusion of existing technologies and infrastructures.
- Professor: Dominique Foray
- Teacher: Gabriele Pellegrino
