Sharing the burden: quantifying climate change spillovers in the European Union under the Paris Agreement

Abstract

Climate change has emerged as a growing threat to the European economy, whose economic losses are relevant for global growth. Rising temperatures and worsening extreme events are expected to affect climate-vulnerable sectors. Due to the economic integration within the European Union (EU), these impacts will likely have spillover effects and feedback loops to and from other regions. This study uses spatial econometrics to account for the interdependencies between the subnational EU regions to estimate the future impacts of changes in temperature on sectoral labour productivity under the Paris Agreement. The study confirms the presence of spatial spillover effects of climate change, and finds that observations at the economy-wide level of a non-linear, concave and single-peaked relationship between temperature and productivity do not always hold true at the sectoral level.