Stern and his critics on discounting and climate change

Values in Time Discounting

Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. (Stern review on the economics of climate change, 2006) and their critics (most prominently Dasgupta in Comments on the Stern r...

Debating Climate Economics: The Stern Review vs. Its Critics Report to Friends of the Earth-UK

In 2005, British Chancellor Gordon Brown asked Sir Nicholas Stern to conduct a major review of the economics of climate change, as a guide to developing government policy. Stern is a well-respected, established economist: he has been the chief economist at the World Bank, the second permanent secretary of HM Treasury, and the head of the (UK) Government Economic Service. It is not a background ...

Stern and the critics on discounting

Numerical Analysis of Non-constant Discounting with an Application to Climate Change Control∗

When current decisions affect welfare in the far-distant future, as with climate change, the use of a declining discount rate provides potentially important modeling flexibility. The difficulty of analyzing models with non-constant discounting limits their application. We describe and provide software (available online) to implement an algorithm to numerically obtain a Markov Perfect Equilibriu...

Discounting, risk and uncertainty in economic appraisals of climate change policy: comparing Nordhaus, Garnaut and Stern

The Stern (2006) and Garnaut (2008) Reviews argued for strong and early action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, while Nordhaus (2001, 2006, 2008a, 2010a) has consistently argued for weaker and more gradual policy action. While the economic debate immediately following the Stern Review focused on discount rates, the more recent literature draws attention to a wider range of issues that unde...