The Slovak Republic should integrate environment into its economic development

As the Slovak Republic strives to increase productivity and competitiveness in the recovery from the financial crisis, the OECD Environmental Performance Review of the Slovak Republic recommends that it strengthen environmental policies and institutions, promoting green growth to help achieve its economic goals.

The Slovak Republic has made major progress in protecting the environment and enhancing its citizens’ quality of life over the past decade. Its environmental achievements include: reducing emissions of most air pollutants during a period of fast economic growth; significantly improving the efficiency of water, energy and material use; improving industries’ environmental performance; and promoting biodiversity conservation in central Europe.

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The report also identifies a range of challenges: unhealthily high pollution in some urban centers; dangerous and costly floods; high reliance on landfill for waste disposal; and among the highest consumption of energy and carbon per unit of GDP of any OECD country.

The OECD Environmental Performance Review of the Slovak Republic makes 35 recommendations including:

• Develop a new environmental strategy as an integral part of Slovakia’s economic and social development planning.
• Improve general innovation capacity, including promoting eco-innovation.
• Draw up a coherent framework to develop and implement climate, energy and transport policies.
• Make environmentally-related taxes more efficient and effective.
• Strengthen dialogue and co-operation with business, NGOs and other stakeholders.
• Better target environmental outcomes when designing support schemes for agriculture and rural development.

The Slovak Republic should integrate environment into its economic development

Environment: OECD supports Israeli initiative to develop a green growth plan

This was the main recommendation of the OECD Environmental Performance Review of Israel. The report is the first OECD review of Israel’s environmental policies since the country joined the OECD one year ago. Presenting the report to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, OECD Deputy Secretary-General Rintaro Tamaki commended the Israeli government’s recent decision to prepare a green growth plan.

As a relatively small, water-scarce, densely populated, and highly-urbanised country, Israel faces pressing environmental challenges. It has made good progress in addressing air pollution, water use and some other environmental challenges.

In the process, Israel has developed a dynamic clean-tech sector. However, the fast pace of economic and population growth intensifies pressures on the environment, including waste generation, habitat degradation and greenhouse gas emissions.

This Review presents 41 recommendations to help address these challenges including:

• Continue to expand the use of environmentally related taxes and market-based instruments, and gradually remove tax concessions that are potentially harmful to the environment.
• Strengthen the mix of policies to support the marketing and diffusion of environment- and climate-related technologies.
• Reinforce environmental liability for damage to natural resources.
• Gradually increase the agricultural and industrial sectors’ share in financing the full costs of water infrastructure.
• Set up a system to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and provide an annual assessment to the Parliament on progress in achieving targets.
• Review current arrangements to manage waste and draw up a comprehensive new policy, possibly including new legislation and an action plan.

For more information on this report see the Highlights.

From growth to green growth -- a framework

Green growth is about making growth processes resource-efficient, cleaner and more resilient without necessarily slowing them. This paper aims at clarifying these concepts in an analytical framework and at proposing foundations for green growth.

The green growth approach proposed here is based on (1) focusing on what needs to happen over the next 5-10 years before the world gets locked into patterns that would be prohibitively expensive and complex to modify and (2) reconciling the short and the long term, by offsetting short-term costs and maximizing synergies and economic co-benefits. This, in turn, increases the social and political acceptability of environmental policies.

This framework identifies channels through which green policies can potentially contribute to economic growth. However, only detailed country- and context-specific analyses for each of these channels could reach firm conclusion regarding their actual impact on growth. Finally, the paper discusses the policies that can be implemented to capture these co-benefits and environmental benefits.

Since green growth policies pursue a variety of goals, they are best served by a combination of instruments: price-based policies are important but are only one component in a policy tool-box that can also include norms and regulation, public production and direct investment, information creation and dissemination, education and moral suasion, or industrial and innovation policies.

Author: Hallegatte,Stephane;Heal,Geoffrey;Fay,Marianne;Treguer,David. Document Date:2011/11/01. Document Type:Policy Research Working Paper. Report Number:WPS5872. Volume No: 1 of 1

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