On Monday, 3 March 2003, the United
Nations Economic Commission for
Europe (UNECE) will hold its sixth
Spring Seminar, which this year
will focus on: "Sustainable
Development in the ECE Region".
The Seminar will be organized
in two sessions; one will be devoted
to a discussion of "The environmental
dimension of economic growth" and
the other will focus on "The sectoral
dimensions of sustainable development:
energy and transport" (see Programme).
For the first session on "The
environmental dimension of economic
growth", the keynote speaker
will be Theodore Panayotou, Center
for International Development at
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
The discussants will be Richard
Herd, OECD, Paris; Tomasz Zylicz,
University of Warsaw; and Kaj Bärlund,
UNECE.
It is often assumed that there
are trade-offs between the goals
of achieving high and sustained
rates of economic growth and attaining
high standards of environmental
quality. The session will address
this potential dichotomy and will
seek to determine to what extent
and how it has been possible to
decouple economic growth from environmental
pressures in the ECE region. What
is the experience in the ECE region
in fostering environmentally-friendly
growth? What has been the role of
structural change and technological
progress? And what can economic
and environmental policies do to
foster the process of decoupling?
What institutional changes and economic
instruments can help to reconcile
economic growth and environmental
objectives? What are the main lessons
from this experience for developed
market economies and for economies
in transition?
For the second session on "Sectoral
dimensions of sustainable development:
energy and transport",
the lead speaker will be David Newbery,
Department of Applied Economics,
Cambridge University, UK. The discussants
will be Thomas B. Johansson, International
Institute for Industrial Environmental
Economics (IIIEE), University of
Lund, Stockholm; Inge Mayeres, Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven; and George
Kowalski, UNECE.
This session will focus on two
major sectoral dimensions of sustainable
development, namely energy and transport.
Energy use is a major source of
environmental pollution and thus
increasing the efficiency of energy
use is an important pre-requisite
of sustainable development. The
session will address some of the
issues pertinent to reducing the
energy intensity of growth and improving
energy efficiency. This will also
include a review of the sectoral
dimension of energy use, i.e. developments
in industry and transport. The following
issues will be addressed: (i) a
comparative assessment of the efficiency
of energy use in the ECE region
and policy lessons of different
experience; (ii) regulation in the
energy sector and the role of specific
policy instruments (such as taxes
and subsidies); (iii) policy measures
aimed at increasing energy efficiency
norms and standards in curbing energy
use (e.g. with regard to vehicles);
(iv) the links between energy prices,
energy consumption and the energy-related
pollution.