Publications :

•  International climate aid and trade (2023) with B. Bayramoglu, J-F. Jacques, and C. Nedoncelle.  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, vol. 117. [Pre-print]

Foreign aid allocation by donor countries to developing economies is known to be motivated by the donor country’s bilateral trade interests. Does this apply also to bilateral climate aid? In this paper, we combine theoretical and empirical analyses to investigate how bilateral trade affects donor countries’ allocations of bilateral climate aid. Our theoretical analysis develops a simple model to support our hypothesis that bilateral trade has a positive impact on climate aid transfers. The model highlights the terms-of-trade and positive income effects of climate aid and predicts a positive relationship between donor countries’ exports to and imports from recipient countries and their climate aid transfers. The empirical analysis is based on bilateral climate aid data from 2002 to 2017. We employ fixed effects and instrumental variable two-stage least square estimations (IV-2SLS) with a shift-share instrument to overcome the endogeneity of trade. Our empirical results show that donors’ exports have a significant, robust, positive effect on climate aid transfers.

•  Where do donor countries stand in climate aid allocation and reporting ? (2022) with B. Bayramoglu. Revue Française d’Économie, vol XXXVII, no. 2. [Pre-print]

In climate negotiations, developed countries have pledged to help developing countries in their climate change mitigation and adaptation’s efforts. Actual climate assistance received is deemed incomplete by recipient countries. The literature indicates that donor countries overestimate the climate change content of their climate aid projects.In this article, we propose a comprehensive review of international climate aid and the related issues at stake before focusing on the over-reporting of climate projects by donor countries. We offer and comment on a large set of descriptive statistics on climate aid over-reporting based on a previous analysis of climate projects’ content by Bayramoglu et al. (2022). Project-level climate aid data are from the OECD Bilateral Development Aid Database and cover 28 donors, 154 recipients, and 63,195 projects from 2002 to 2018.

Work in progress :

• International climate finance: has it been effective?

The literature has long tried to answer the question of the effectiveness of foreign aid in promoting growth among its recipients. In recent decades, foreign assistance has targeted new objectives and specifically climate objectives. How effective has it been in tackling these new challenges? In the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, international climate transfers to developing countries are described as a necessary tool for addressing both the threat of climate change and the call for international climate justice. In this paper, we investigate two empirical strategies to estimate the effect of international public climate finance on sectoral GHG emissions, focusing on the technique effect of these transfers. We further assess the capacity of climate finance to diffuse less carbon-intensive technologies and production practices in the recipient countries’ economies through intermediary outcomes such as energy mix and intensity, green technology transfers and agricultural practices. To do so, we use the OECD-DAC climate finance data from 2000 to 2020, covering 155 recipient countries. We first estimate a panel model using the instrumental variable two-stage least squares technique with a shift-share instrument to address climate transfers endogeneity. We then propose a staggered difference-in-differences setup comparing small and large recipients at the sectoral level and using heterogeneity-robust estimators. This strategy accounts for heterogeneity in climate transfers' effects related to the time and length of their allocation. Our preliminary estimations converge to the absence of an effect of international public climate transfers on the recipient countries' sectoral emissions. This result holds when considering different subsamples of recipient countries and is consistent across different accounting definitions of climate transfers.

• Is international climate aid really climate-related? Extent and determinants of donor countries miscoding of climate projects, with B. Bayramoglu et A. Dequet. 

Contrary to donor countries' self-declarations, actual assistance received for climate change mitigation and adaptation is deemed incomplete by recipient countries. The existing literature indicates that donor countries overestimate the climate change content of their international aid projects. In this article, we consider new data corresponding to international climate projects funded by donor countries between 2002 and 2018 using the project-level database from the OECD-DAC Creditor Reporting System. First, we assess the share of projects wrongly reported as climate-relevant in a systematic way through a textual analysis with Python programming and complementary hand-coding. We find that out of the 63,195 projects reported as climate-relevant by donor countries, nearly half (48.6%) were not climate-related. Furthermore, we find that 67.8% of adaptation projects and 64.3% of mitigation projects were miscoded. Second, using country-level data for 28 donor countries from 2002 to 2018, we estimate the factors that may affect the miscoding of climate projects. Adding to the results of the literature, we find that the political-economy argument stating that miscoding could be an electoral strategy for donor governments is only valid for less wealthy donor countries. 

• International climate finance and the demand for climate justice

As early (or late) as 1990 at the 2nd World Climate Conference held in Geneva, financial and technology transfers from developed countries to developing economies were identified as a potential tool to address both the climate change crisis and the demand for climate justice. In this analytical paper, we present the main facts and challenges surrounding international public climate finance, as well as the historical background of its implementation. This general overview of international climate finance gives us the necessary perspective to better understand the issues at stake in current international climate negotiations and the diplomacy of emerging and developing countries. After detailing international climate finance flows and how they must respond to developing countries’ needs, we review the history of international climate negotiations through the lens of climate justice. This paper also offers extensive descriptive statistics on public climate finance to developing countries based on the OECD climate-related development finance database from 2000 to 2021 and covering 155 recipient countries, 36 donor countries and 21 multilateral donor agencies.

• Le Monde (12/01/23), « L’aide internationale pour le climat est faible, peu efficace et inéquitablement attribuée ». Opinion piece on international climate aid with Basak Bayramoglu, Jean-François Jacques and Clément Nedoncelle.

•  ORF article (09/11/22) and radio piece about our work on climate aid and trade.