Competitiveness, cost of living and cutting emissions: Can policy do it all?
OnlineNov 13, 2025 | 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
OnlineNov 13, 2025 | 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Description
Policymakers around the world are balancing an increasingly complex set of policy priorities when deciding how to tax energy use or price carbon emissions, including securing public revenue, keeping energy affordable, minimising cost-of-living pressures, strengthening energy security and maintaining economic competitiveness, while reducing air pollution or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Effective Carbon Rates 2025 describes the outcomes of the policy reforms implemented in response to evolving objectives. Two key observations are that the policy landscape grows more diverse across countries and that policy approaches become more flexible approaches as governments seek to reconcile different interconnected objectives. A further finding is that the deployment of emissions trading systems continues to expand to new countries and to more sectors.
The shifts in approaches to energy taxation and carbon pricing raise several questions, for example, on how to strike a good balance among policy objectives, and on the potential synergies and trade-offs between co-existing systems from economic and climate perspectives.
This session will present the OECD’s new Effective Carbon Rates report. Following the presentation, experts will share their views on the above issues, offering perspectives on how to ensure effectiveness and efficiency given increasing policy diversity.



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