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Mini course on carbon budgets and economic growth

Welcome

In this compact and easy-to-follow mini course, you will learn about the relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions and the implications for global and country-level carbon budgets.

The course is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but we hope that by the end of the course you will have learned something about the following:

  • the relationship between CO2 emissions and economic growth
  • the two fundamental ways of reducing carbon emissions: decoupling and degrowth
  • the concept of global and country-level carbon budgets and
  • the climate justice problem involved in allocating the global carbon budget to individual countries

Throughout the course you will have the opportunity to look at actual data so that you can get a sense of how the relationship between CO2 emissions and economic growth has evolved in the past for the world and for individual countries. You will also be able to create simple scenarios for future CO2 emission pathways conditional on the rate of economic growth and the rate of decoupling of economic activity from CO2 emissions.1

Let’s get started.

Who we are

Franz Prante

Franz is a research associate at the Institute for Socio-Economics of the University of Duisburg-Essen where he is currently developing interactive web-based illustrations of economic policy problems. His work focuses on macroeconomics, economic policy, income distribution and carbon budgets.

Till van Treeck

Till is a professor at the Institute for Socio-Economics of the University of Duisburg-Essen and Theodor Heuss Visiting Professor at the New School. His main areas of research are: Income distribution from a macroeconomic perspective, comparative political economy, socioeconomic education.