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.

The trade-off between economic growth and environmental impact is a central topic in the context of climate change and sustainable development, and evidence for decoupling of their trends has been largely investigated and debated in the literature. While no clear evidence emerged, advocates of the beyond-GDP perspective propose replacing GDP with more comprehensive measure of well-being as the target of public policy and societal progress. Whether a broader concept of well-being could be less determined by emissions is however a question that still needs to be answered. This study explores the decoupling of well-being from environmental impacts in European countries over the period 1990–2020, focusing on emissions per capita and energy consumption. Unlike existing studies that rely on single proxies for well-being, this paper adopts a comparative approach, analyzing multiple well-being indicators, including the Human Development Index (HDI), the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), the Social Progress Index (SPI), and wealth-based measures. This broader perspective provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interconnections between well-being, emissions, and energy use. We employ an augmented Kaya identity, which decomposes per capita emissions into four components: the direct impact of well-being, the economic intensity of well-being (GDP per unit of well-being), the energy intensity of production (energy per unit of GDP), and the carbon intensity of energy (emissions per unit of energy). This approach permits a clear distinction between the direct impact of an increase in well-being on emissions and the portion of its impact that depends on GDP. The analysis contributes to the ongoing debate on beyond-GDP measures and provides insight into how countries can achieve well-being improvements while mitigating environmental impacts. These findings are particularly relevant in the context of the broader debate between green growth and post-growth perspectives, where the former seeks to reconcile growth with environmental limits, while the latter questions the centrality of GDP growth in achieving sustainable development.