Martina Sartori Wins a Scholarship by Estimating the Effects of Climate Change

THE CENTER OF POLICY STUDIES, VICTORIA UNIVERSITY, AND THE GLOBAL TRADE ANALYSIS PROJECT HAVE ASSIGNED THE 2016 KEN PEARSON SCHOLARSHIP TO THE IEFE JUNIOR RESEARCH FELLOW

Martina Sartori, junior research fellow at IEFE, Bocconi’s Centre for Research on Energy and Environmental Economics and Management, is the recipient of the 2016 Ken Pearson Scholarship for her Estimation of Climate Change Damage Functions for 140 Regions in the GTAP9 Database, coauthored with Roberto Roson, senior research fellow at IEFE. (Pictured above, Sartori receives the scholarship).
 
The scholarship is funded by the Center of Policy Studies, Victoria University to honor the late Professor Ken Pearson, a pioneer in the field of computable general equilibrium modeling, and assigned to a young researcher participating in the annual GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) Conference.
 
In their paper, Sartori and Roson estimate the effect of a 3°C increase in average temperature on the economies of 140 countries and regions. They consider the effects of climate change on sea level rise, agriculture, labor productivity, tourism, human health and household energy demand. Their estimates are then aggregated to approximate the net effect on the real GDP of each country.
 
“Climate change can affect one country’s economy both negatively and positively”, Sartori says. “Our results suggest that temperate countries’ economies can be unaffected or slightly positively affected by global warming, while tropical countries would be damaged. In general, the effect on European countries is slightly positive, ranging from a 0.75% rise in GDP for Germany to 2.84% for Luxembourg, with the remarkable exceptions of warmer countries such as Greece (-1.35%) and Cyprus (-4.61%). The effect on Italy is negligible (-0.18%)”.
 
On the other hand, Asian, African and Central and Southern American countries could be badly hit by the increase in temperature, with Togo and Cambodia (-18%) the worst affected. Climate change impacts act like a highly regressive tax, often making poor countries poorer, and rich countries richer.
 
Tourism is the dominant impact on the aggregate effect on GDP for more than half of the countries, followed by heat effects on labor productivity (25% of the countries).

by Fabio Todesco