Pierre Beaucoral et Gracia Rahi

12h15 : Development Goals, Emissions Costs?" Climate and Development Finance vis-à-vis Local CO2 Emissions

Pierre Beaucoral 
CERDI, Université Clermont Auvergne

Résumé : Can development be decoupled from carbon emissions where investments actually land? To address this question, I use development-finance portfolios as a laboratory: projects arrive at different times, intensities, and sectors across locations, generating variation in local exposure. I compile a global ADM2-year panel (2000–2023) linking geocoded development projects to local CO2 emissions and night-time lights. To measure climate finance consistently across donors, I classify project description using natural language processing techniques into mitigation, adaptation/environment, and non-climate flows. Exploiting staggered project arrival with not-yet-treated difference-in-differences and a dose–response design, I find that climate portfolios generate modest average emissions reductions, with effects becoming meaningfully more negative only at higher cumulative exposure. In contrast, non-climate development finance raises local emissions in the medium run. Night-time lights indicate visible expansion in mid-brightness regions, while lights are muted in already bright places even as emissions rise, consistent with compositional shifts and lighting/land-use changes. Disaggregating climate finance highlights solar and environment protection as “win–win” investments where lights increase while emissions fall, implying that decarbonization requires both scaling effective climate finance and greening mainstream development spending.

www.theses.fr/s370798

12h45 : Could oil industry fiscal system serve as a de facto carbon tax?

Gracia Rahi
CERDI, Université Clermont Auvergne

Résumé : We examine the impact of the fiscal system in oil extractive industries, represented by the average effective tax rate (AETR) on the sector carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) in oil-rich countries. To test this hypothesis, we employ fixed effects regressions with Driscoll Kraay standard errors, as well as a dynamic fixed-effects estimator to distinguish between long- and short-term effects, using a panel of 25 oil-rich countries from 1980 to 2019. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we further estimate an instrumental variable, and the results remain robust across different specifications. Our findings suggest that the structure of fiscal regimes in the oil sector can play an underlying environmental role, helping to explain differences in emissions performance across countries. These results indicate that governments, beyond balancing revenue and resource management, can arbitrate environmental outcomes by shaping fiscal systems to better align private investment decisions with climate goals.   

https://theses.fr/s400426