A note on climate change and growth dynamics

Climate change is, perhaps, the most important of challenges currently facing humankind, with the potential to have health and welfare implications by imposing a sizeable aggregate risk to the economy. Given this, and in the wake of an ever-burgeoning literature on the nexus between climate change a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rangan Gupta, Sarah Nandnaba, Wei Jiang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2024-12-01
Series:Sustainable Futures
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188824002168
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1850113856749174784
author Rangan Gupta
Sarah Nandnaba
Wei Jiang
author_facet Rangan Gupta
Sarah Nandnaba
Wei Jiang
author_sort Rangan Gupta
collection DOAJ
description Climate change is, perhaps, the most important of challenges currently facing humankind, with the potential to have health and welfare implications by imposing a sizeable aggregate risk to the economy. Given this, and in the wake of an ever-burgeoning literature on the nexus between climate change and economic growth, we develop an overlapping generations endogenous growth model characterized by climate change, with the latter being specified as a fraction of output lost due to changes in temperature anomalies. We show that growth dynamics arise in this model when changes in temperature anomalies are a positive function of current economic growth, i.e., considered to be endogenous unlike existing theoretical models on this topic, with this theoretical specification motivated through extensive empirical analyses involving 167 countries over a long span of historical data covering 1851 to 2018. In particular, two distinct oscillatory growth dynamics emerge: one convergent and the other divergent, contingent on the strength of the response of global warming, i.e., changes in temperature anomalies to current economic growth. Our theoretical results suggest that policymakers should be cognizant that unless economic growth is “green”, rapid global warming can put economies in a fluctuating, divergent, balanced growth.
format Article
id doaj-art-4285f92117d34a27a85f4bcfb49441c8
institution OA Journals
issn 2666-1888
language English
publishDate 2024-12-01
publisher Elsevier
record_format Article
series Sustainable Futures
spelling doaj-art-4285f92117d34a27a85f4bcfb49441c82025-08-20T02:37:03ZengElsevierSustainable Futures2666-18882024-12-01810036710.1016/j.sftr.2024.100367A note on climate change and growth dynamicsRangan Gupta0Sarah Nandnaba1Wei Jiang2Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa; Corresponding author.Department of Economics, École Normale Superieure (ENS) Paris-Saclay, 91190 Gif-sur-Yvette, FranceSchool of Economics, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7PE, United KingdomClimate change is, perhaps, the most important of challenges currently facing humankind, with the potential to have health and welfare implications by imposing a sizeable aggregate risk to the economy. Given this, and in the wake of an ever-burgeoning literature on the nexus between climate change and economic growth, we develop an overlapping generations endogenous growth model characterized by climate change, with the latter being specified as a fraction of output lost due to changes in temperature anomalies. We show that growth dynamics arise in this model when changes in temperature anomalies are a positive function of current economic growth, i.e., considered to be endogenous unlike existing theoretical models on this topic, with this theoretical specification motivated through extensive empirical analyses involving 167 countries over a long span of historical data covering 1851 to 2018. In particular, two distinct oscillatory growth dynamics emerge: one convergent and the other divergent, contingent on the strength of the response of global warming, i.e., changes in temperature anomalies to current economic growth. Our theoretical results suggest that policymakers should be cognizant that unless economic growth is “green”, rapid global warming can put economies in a fluctuating, divergent, balanced growth.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188824002168Climate changeEndogenous growthDynamics
spellingShingle Rangan Gupta
Sarah Nandnaba
Wei Jiang
A note on climate change and growth dynamics
Sustainable Futures
Climate change
Endogenous growth
Dynamics
title A note on climate change and growth dynamics
title_full A note on climate change and growth dynamics
title_fullStr A note on climate change and growth dynamics
title_full_unstemmed A note on climate change and growth dynamics
title_short A note on climate change and growth dynamics
title_sort note on climate change and growth dynamics
topic Climate change
Endogenous growth
Dynamics
url http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188824002168
work_keys_str_mv AT rangangupta anoteonclimatechangeandgrowthdynamics
AT sarahnandnaba anoteonclimatechangeandgrowthdynamics
AT weijiang anoteonclimatechangeandgrowthdynamics
AT rangangupta noteonclimatechangeandgrowthdynamics
AT sarahnandnaba noteonclimatechangeandgrowthdynamics
AT weijiang noteonclimatechangeandgrowthdynamics