Climate-change Policy: A Survey
5th May 2005 publication
In D. Helm (ed.), Climate-change Policy, published May 2005 by Oxford University Press, pp. 11-30. Climate change presents a challenge to policy-makers of an altogether different kind to the day-to-day business of intervention in the economy to correct market failures. It is characterised by major and multi-dimensional uncertainties (in the science, the economics, and the politics), it is an externality created by almost all production and consumption, and it requires international cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Arguably, there is no other economic problem on this scale - save perhaps the related one of population growth.