This paper examines whether local exposure to extreme weather affects support for national climate and energy policies in Switzerland. We construct a municipality-referendum panel linking high-resolution MeteoSwiss data on extreme heat and intense precipitation to municipal voting outcomes in federal referenda. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design and Callaway–Sant’Anna event-study estimators, we compare municipalities first exposed to extreme weather shocks with not-yet-treated municipalities. The results provide little evidence that extreme weather increases support for environmental policy. If anything, the estimates point in the opposite direction: in selected rainfall specifications, environmental yes-shares decline by around 2.7–2.8 percentage points after extreme shocks. These estimates are based on small, geographically concentrated treated cohorts and should therefore be interpreted as cohort-specific. The findings are consistent with the view that salient local shocks may reduce willingness to support costly environmental policies, rather than producing experience-based updating in favor of climate action.
This paper reviews the economic interpretations of strategic autonomy, which has been reintroduced, and sheds new light on it from the perspective of the European economy using a systems approach. The scientific conundrum is whether European strategic autonomy requires strengthening internal quantitative growth or whether it requires a shift towards degrowth – a transition that ultimately trades strategic autonomy for systemic resilience. The paper uses the zombie phenomenon to demonstrate the flawed nature of quantitative economic growth-based strategic autonomy and the necessity of a degrowth transition that replaces autonomy with resilience, which necessitates the fundamental reassessment of the role of zombies.
Comparable levels of realised disaster impact were associated with substantially smaller macroeconomic losses after Vietnam's late-1990s development transition—not because the available meteorological indicators became systematically weaker, but as the economic transmission of realised impacts changed. This paper examines how the relationship between natural disaster impacts and macroeconomic losses evolves as economies develop. Using annual data for Vietnam from 1986 to 2025, we construct a multidimensional Natural Disaster Impact Index (NDII), positioned within the hazard–exposure–vulnerability framework, that captures realised physical and social damage across four dimensions. Hansen's threshold regression identifies a statistically significant transition around 1999, coinciding with agriculture's share of GDP declining to approximately one-quarter and a broader period of industrialisation and international integration. Beyond this threshold, the estimated marginal association between disaster impacts and economic losses is roughly half its earlier magnitude. The attenuation is considerably larger for economic damage than for social damage, while agricultural share independently reproduces the transition and significantly conditions disaster sensitivity. These patterns provide stronger support for structural transformation than for institutional adaptation or financial buffering alone. Purely meteorological indicators produce no comparable threshold, making a hazard-only explanation less consistent with the evidence. The findings show how structural transformation can reorganise the transmission of disaster impacts without eliminating the exposure accompanying continued development.
Land-based climate policies in forest-rich developing economies are often assessed separately, overlooking how land scarcity, land prices, and macroeconomic constraints shape feasibility. This paper examines the macro-financial challenges of sustainable agriculture and forest conservation in Bolivia, where deforestation is high and fiscal and external constraints bind. We develop a dynamic version of the Exposure to Structural Transformation in an Ecologic-Economic Model (D-ESTEEM) to jointly analyse Bolivia's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) policies for forest conservation and agricultural productivity. The locally calibrated, environmentally extended input-output model combines continuous-time monetary system dynamics, endogenous land prices, and demand-led adjustments in a small open economy. Forest conservation reduces environmental pressures but raises land prices, weakening the competitiveness of land-intensive activities and worsening fiscal and balance-of-payments pressures. Agricultural productivity measures ease land pressures and support output but rely on imported inputs, reinforcing external dependence. Overall, the NDCs improve economic activity and environmental outcomes while worsening fiscal and trade imbalances. Fiscal consolidation and exchange-rate adjustment mitigate some imbalances but entail inflationary pressures or lower output and employment. Environmental gains may therefore come at the cost of macroeconomic fragility. The paper shows how conservation-induced land scarcity and land price dynamics interact with fiscal and balance-of-payments constraints to determine the feasibility of land-based transitions in resource-dependent economies.
