Undermining the Earth with Public Funds and Subsidies
* Report: SUBSIDIZING UNSUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. Undermining the Earth with public funds. By Andre? de Moor and Peter Calama. Commissioned by the Earth Council.
URL = https://www.cbd.int/doc/case-studies/inc/cs-inc-earthcouncil-unsustainable-en.pdf
Description
"In principle, there can be no question that subsidies can be a useful and beneficial means of providing incentives to meet objectives that governments believe are economically or socially desirable. But in practice such subsidies tend to become deeply entrenched in the expectations and interests of those who benefit from them, long after they have served their original purposes; there is also great resistance to any attempt to change these subsidies, even when their costs have reached a point where they far outweigh any conceivable benefits.
Recently it has become apparent that in many cases such incentives also exact a high cost in environmental and social terms which undermines the prospects for effecting the transition to sustainable development. The extent of this is brought out persuasively in this study by Andre? de Moor of the Institute for Research on Public Expenditures commissioned by the Earth Council with the support of the Netherlands government and the World Bank, which is the subject of this report. Led by the distinguished Dutch Economist and Minister, former Secretary-General of the OECD, Emile van Lennep, it focused on four sectors : energy, road transport, water and agriculture in which such perverse incentives have become pervasive. It demonstrates dramatically how in so many cases the subsidies provide disincentives to sustainable development while denying to the poor the benefits which better deployment of these resources could produce. At a time when new funding is becoming more and more difficult to come by, this study makes it clear that there is an immense potential for redeployment of existing resources to provide positive incentives and support for sustainable development while improving economic efficiency and competitivenes."