The European Green Deal’s goal of making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 requires an adequate mix of policies. This paper analyses three decades of climate policy from a historical perspective to provide insights into the multi-level policy framework within the EU and its Member States. Based on the Climate Policy Dataset, the paper develops an assessment guided by three key perspectives: policy density, sectoral focus, and policy instruments. Two new indexes are proposed for policy evaluation: the emissions coverage indicator, which assesses the sectoral application of policies, and the Policy Mix Thickness Index, which measures the complexity of the policy packages in terms of instruments employed. The results indicate that different strategies have been adopted at the EU and national levels in terms of policy instruments and targeted sectors. EU-level policies tend to complement Member States actions by providing long-term strategies and addressing sectors with limited national-level initiatives.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of place brand as a Multilevel Threshold Public Good (MTPG) produced by the interaction of narratives from different geographical levels. Using an original dataset of Google trends and tweets from Italian provinces and regions, we test the hypothesis that place branding has a multilevel structure. We further test the MTPG framework applied to place branding, showing that place branding is influenced by different geographic levels which can trigger a spillover in terms of attractiveness if they contribute to crossing a threshold point. The results confirm the presence of a provision point in place branding, showing that the proposed MTPG framework fits the phenomenon. This article contributes to the literature on place branding and brands by providing a new lens for interpreting the phenomenon, which may be useful in better understanding and measuring the interaction of branding strategies operating at different spatial scales.

Numerous beyond-GDP alternatives have been proposed to better capture societal progress. So far, none has been able to gather enough public and political support to remove GDP from its dominant position. This paper argues that, for a beyond-GDP indicator to influence economic and political behaviour, it must be appealing in three aspects: statistical, policy and communicative. Regarding statistical appeal, an indicator should measure societal progress in a manner that is accurate, reliable, and comparable across countries and over time. Regarding policy appeal, an indicator should be able to inform and evaluate public policy. Regarding communicative appeal, an indicator should arouse the intended audience’s interest and resonate with their perceptions of societal progress. To illustrate the framework, the paper compares eight distinct beyond-GDP alternatives, covering monetary, composite, subjective wellbeing, and dashboard approaches, using the three appeal criteria.

Prior research produced contradicting evidence regarding the role of international influence in the diffusion of climate policies. To unravel this puzzle, we examine various policy instruments adopted by G20 countries, demonstrating that peer pressure stimulates convergence in the number of new policies adopted but divergence in their stringency. This suggests that policymakers emulate the appearance of their peers but not the rigor of regulation, creating opportunities for carbon leakage.

We study how inequality affects the feasibility of an international agreement on the provision of an environmental public good in a two-country two-level political economy model. At the international level, two negotiators try to agree on the respective country’s provision of the public good under different international equity rules, knowing that this agreement will need to be accepted by the median voter in each country. At the national level, agents’ preferences for the public good depend on their relative income position, which implies that negotiators must also take into account the level of inequality within their country. We show that the feasibility of the agreement and the distribution of the gains from cooperation depends on the equity rule imposed, on the levels of within-country inequality, and on the level of cross-country inequality.

This paper analyzes the influence of inequality on the demand for mitigation policies, aiming to disentangle the mechanisms through which national income inequality interacts with the adoption of climate policies. The analysis covers national mitigation policies implemented in G20 countries between 1997 and 2021, derived from the Climate Policy Database. We analyze the effect of average income (GDP per capita PPP) and inequality on policy adoption through a fixed-effects and Correlated Random Effect Poisson regression model. To capture different aspects of the income distribution, we adopt several measures of inequality, all derived from the World Inequality Database. These measures include common composite inequality indexes and specific income percentiles. In addition, we built a new composite inequality index, proposed by Sitthiyot and Holasut (2020). The results show that the impact of inequality on climate policy implementation depends on the average income level of the country. While in rich countries a reduction in inequality leads to fewer mitigation policies, in poorer countries an increase in inequality may push for the adoption of new policies. Our results confirm the possible trade-off between inequality and environmental protection, providing new insights into its structure.