This report combines multiple novel datasets to provide evidence that government support has contributed to increased carbon emissions from aluminium and steelmaking activities through an increase in production output and by shifting production to more emission intensive plants. While improvements in technology have driven overall emissions downward, there is no evidence that government support in this sector has been targeted at, or has contributed to, developing techniques that improve environmental performance. Removing such support could therefore contribute to a cost-effective decarbonisation strategy. For example, removing government support to aluminium smelting and steel making worldwide would reduce carbon emissions by 75% more than the reduction observed in 2020 resulting from COVID-related restrictions. In addition, the removal of such support would free up scarce public resources for alternative uses.

This paper identifies an externality of Multinationals on trade channelled through their power of promoting cultures across countries. It shows how multinationals from some origin country, selling products known to embody some cultural information, actually promotes exports of the latter. We choose the IKEA case to identify the culture-promotion effect on trade. We build a dataset on IKEA presence in foreign markets between 1995 and 2015 and merge it with product level trade between pairs of countries. IKEA is a an interesting case to identify the externality on scandinavian trade through the culture promotion effect for at least three reasons: 1-it is known to promote the Swedish culture in particular and the Scandinavian culture in general, 2-compared to the world, Scandinavia is a very small region in terms of its economy and political power making IKEA establishment and exports from Scandinavia exogenous a priori to Scandinavian diplomatic and other foreign related policies. 3- IKEA retail stores do not get delivered their products directly from home (i.e. Sweden). We find solid evidence of IKEA store presence in one destination to increase Swedish and to some extent other Scandinavian countries' exports of these goods, through what we identify to be the culture-promotion channel.

We analyze the polluting firms’ location among countries belonging to the same integrated economic union (i.e. countries of the European Union or countries belonging to the West African Economic and Monetary Union). We propose a two-country two-sector model with capital mobility. In this framework, we introduce an environmental dimension: governments take account of the environmental quality in addition to the utility provided by pecuniary aspects (such as wages and price index) to maximize the aggregated welfare of the households. To do this, they can set an environmental tax to regulate the polluting activity on their territory and thus to limit local pollution. The environmental policy can be also set at a supranational level. In this case, a supranational government (i.e. European Commission) is considered: its objective is to maximize the sum of the aggregated welfare of the two countries, of the "integrated area". A trade-off might emerge in terms of the environmental strategy to follow, at national or supranational level.