Le Rapport Stern sur l'économie du changement climatique était-il une manipulation grossière de la méthodologie économique ?

Olivier Godard

Revue d'économie politique, 2007, vol. 117, issue 4, 475-506

Abstract: Applauded by several Nobel-price winners (Mirrlees, Sen, Solow, Stiglitz) the Stern review has been soon exposed to severe criticisms of other economists, noticeably North-American. The core of those criticisms targets choices of the discount rate and the way uncertainty and adaptation of future generations to new climatic conditions have been approached. It is said that the Stern team had cooked the economic book in order to sketch a catastrophic picture of the climate issue and justify strong and fast preventive action, which was the well-known position of the UK government that ordered the review. The results of a critical examination of these criticisms are that the Stern review can be rightly opposed some methodological limits and shortcuts, but also that for essential matters, it is more right than wrong, in the context of the utilitarist philosophy that provides the conceptual basis of cost-benefit analysis used as well by Stern and his critics. Curiously, like a boomerang, the positions of certain of his eminent critics are revealed to be rather weak and inconsistent. Beyond, objections can rightly be made against the relevance of the cost-benefit framework to address such an issue as global climate change. It does not mean that non-utilitarist alternatives find an easier way, since several of them also meet important difficulties. Notwithstanding the choice of the best analytical framing, the dressing of the debate in terms of economic efficiency is deceiving since the issue is dominated by the ethical standing to be acknowledged to future generations and the legitimacy of imposed transfers of costs in asymmetrical contexts, two questions that economic analysis is not well-equipped to arbitrate.

Keywords: climate change; discounting; intergenerational equity-cost; benefit analysis; adap; tation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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