Assessing and Comparing the Effects of Climate Public Policies – A New Approach

Assessing and comparing the effects of climate policy measures is of central academic and practical concern. Existing approaches either focus on individual climate policies or the effect of entire climate “policy regimes.” What is missing is an approach that captures and compares the effects of individual climate policies within the context of larger climate policy portfolios. This gap can lead to inaccurate predictions and a less nuanced understanding of climate policy impacts. To address this gap, a more integrated analytical framework is needed—one that considers the interplay and cumulative effects of various policy measures within countries’ broader climate strategies.

This paper introduces such an approach. Drawing on models developed in the area of genome-wide association studies, we establish an analytical procedure that (1) encapsulates and delineates the entire spectrum of climate policies and (2) discerns and contrasts the influence of each policy on greenhouse gas emissions vis-à-vis the wider policy framework. This dual-phase process not only dissects singular policy impacts but also places them into a comparative context alongside the cumulative effects of concurrent policy measures.

This Bayesian-based procedure – the so-called “Conditional Effects in Climate Change Policies” (CECCP) approach creates a concise overview of a particular policy regime and clusters its components into policies with positive, negative, and no associations with emission changes. Our empirical application investigates climate policy effects across 21 OECD countries over a span of more than two decades, revealing intricate dynamics and efficacy profiles of climate policies. This comprehensive analysis underscores the heterogeneity in policy effectiveness and emphasizes the potential for policy learning and transfer within and across countries. Through CECCP, policy-makers are equipped with a more refined toolset for assessing the effectiveness of different climate policy options.