Climate change is one of the central challenges of the coming decades. Policy must take important decisions to set the course for a viable future. The current debate in Germany rightly focuses on the decarbonization of our energy consumption, but climate change obviously has global causes and global effects. In this seminar we will examine economic concepts for determining the costs triggered by climate change and discuss a variety of proposed solutions from an economic perspective, ranging from a carbon tax to the Green New Deal and geoengineering. Distributional effects and political feasibility will also play a central role in our course. Another focus of the seminar will be the special role of the Global South, which has hardly contributed to carbon emissions in the past, but whose importance will increase significantly in the future due to rapid economic and population growth. Furthermore, poor countries in Africa and South Asia will be most vulnerable to a changing environment, which raises questions of how to increase their resilience.
The course (literature, term paper and the discussion) will be in English.
Basic knowledge in econometrics, evaluation methodologies (e.g. RCTs vs. Difference in Differences), and development economics is a prerequisite to participate in this course. This course is available on the M.A. Development Studies, the M.A. International Economics and Business, the M.A. International Cultural and Business Studies and the M.A. Governance and Public Policy.
Please enrol via StudIP for this seminar (no 32500 - enrolment period 22-29 June 2020 ). Afterwards please send a short CV and an up-to-date grade sheet (HISQIS) to DevEcon@uni-passau.de.
We will inform you as soon as possible if you are offered a place in the seminar. You can back out without consequences until 7 July 2020, the nascent places will be given to the students on the waiting list. If you back out after 7 July 2020, you will be graded with NA (nicht angetreten = 5,0).
The seminar will take place as a block seminar in January (presumably 21.-23.01.2021). Topics will be assigned in mid-September. An introductory online Q&A session will be held in early/mid-October (as a webinar). The final paper is due on tba (approx. December).