1887

OECD Economics Department Working Papers

Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.

The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.

English, French

Measuring environmental policy stringency in OECD countries

An update of the OECD composite EPS indicator

As countries implement stricter environmental policies, the need for tools to compare countries’ environmental policy stringency is becoming more pressing. The OECD Environmental Policy Stringency (EPS) index has become a widely used tool for policy analysis since its creation in 2014. This paper updates the EPS index over three decades from 1990 to 2020, across 40 countries and 13 policy instruments, focussing on climate change and air pollution mitigation policies. It up-grades the index structure across all years, adding a new sub-index that measures the strength of technology support policies, which complements the existing structure of market based and non-market based sub-indices. The paper shows evolving developments – across countries and time – in the stringency of environmental policies.

English

Keywords: Environmental policy stringency, environmental regulation, composite indicators
JEL: Q58: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Environmental Economics: Government Policy; Q50: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Environmental Economics / Environmental Economics: General; Q48: Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics / Energy / Energy: Government Policy
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