Reference Library

World Inequality Report 2022 - Summary Report

World Inequality Report 2022 - Summary Report

URL: https://wir2022.wid.world/

 

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Fuelling the Fourth Propulsion Revolution - An Opportunity for All

Fuelling the Fourth Propulsion Revolution - An Opportunity for All

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Report For Review of Maritime Activities

Report For Review of Maritime Activities

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Maritime Trade Disrupted: The war in Ukraine and its effects on maritime trade logistics

The war in the Ukraine is stifling trade and logistics of Ukraine and the Black Sea region. The search for alternate trade routes for Ukrainian goods has rapidly increased the demands on land and maritime transport infrastructure and services.

For Ukraine's trading partners, many commodities now have to be sourced from further away. This has increased global vessel demand and the cost of shipping around the world.

Grains are of particular concern given the leading role of the Russian Federation and Ukraine in agrifood markets, and its nexus to food security and poverty reduction.

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Developing a global transport costs dataset for international trade

This paper describes the sources and methods used for the compilation of the new Global Transport Costs Dataset on International Trade (GTCDIT), a beta version of which is publicly available on UNCTADstat.

GTCDIT records bilateral international merchandise trade in value and quantity, broken down by commodity group and mode of transport (air, sea, railway, road, other modes), alongside its associated transport costs, for 2016. The compilation of GTCDIT has been made possible by the availability of new variables in a recent upgrade of the UN Comtrade database and of new estimates on global transport distances derived with the help of geographic information systems.

To obtain global coverage, the primary data on the new variables in UN Comtrade reported by some countries have been used to develop models that estimate the missing values of most other countries.

As a result, GTCDIT covers around 87 per cent of global trade in terms of value.

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Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on trade and development: Lessons learned

Two years might not be enough to have a full understanding of all that took place due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic since 2020, especially as the pandemic is still not over. But it is nonetheless imperative that institutions such as ours try to find instances, such as this, to pause and reflect on all that has happened recently – both the deep recession of 2020, and the fragile and uneven rebound the world witnessed last year – to derive valuable lessons for the future.

This 2022 report, Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Trade and Development: Lessons Learned, attempts to provide our most comprehensive take on the pandemic yet, using for that purpose all the analyses we have undertaken from the beginning of this crisis. This task is not easy. COVID-19 has spread across the globe like a domino, reaching every corner and creating disruptions unprecedented in recent history.

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Climate consequences of hydrogen emissions

Given the urgency to decarbonize global energy systems, governments and industry are moving ahead with efforts to increase deployment of hydrogen technologies, infrastructure, and applications at an unprecedented pace, including USD billions in national incentives and direct investments. While zero- and low-carbon hydrogen hold great promise to help solve some of the world's most pressing energy challenges, hydrogen is also an indirect greenhouse gas whose warming impact is both widely overlooked and underestimated. This is largely because hydrogen's atmospheric warming effects are short-lived – lasting only a couple decades – but standard methods for characterizing climate impacts of gases consider only the long-term effect from a one-time pulse of emissions. For gases whose impacts are short-lived, like hydrogen, this long-term framing masks a much stronger warming potency in the near to medium term. This is of concern because hydrogen is a small molecule known to easily leak into the atmosphere, and the total amount of emissions (e.g., leakage, venting, and purging) from existing hydrogen systems is unknown. Therefore, the effectiveness of hydrogen as a decarbonization strategy, especially over timescales of several decades, remains unclear. This paper evaluates the climate consequences of hydrogen emissions over all timescales by employing already published data to assess its potency as a climate forcer, evaluate the net warming impacts from replacing fossil fuel technologies with their clean hydrogen alternatives, and estimate temperature responses to projected levels of hydrogen demand. We use the standard global warming potential metric, given its acceptance to stakeholders, and incorporate newly published equations that more fully capture hydrogen's several indirect effects, but we consider the effects of constant rather than pulse emissions over multiple time horizons. We account for a plausible range of hydrogen emission rates and include methane emissions when hydrogen is produced via natural gas with carbon capture, usage, and storage (CCUS) (“blue” hydrogen) as opposed to renewables and water (“green” hydrogen). For the first time, we show the strong timescale dependence when evaluating the climate change mitigation potential of clean hydrogen alternatives, with the emission rate determining the scale of climate benefits or disbenefits. For example, green hydrogen applications with higher-end emission rates (10 %) may only cut climate impacts from fossil fuel technologies in half over the first 2 decades, which is far from the common perception that green hydrogen energy systems are climate neutral. However, over a 100-year period, climate impacts could be reduced by around 80 %. On the other hand, lower-end emissions (1 %) could yield limited impacts on the climate over all timescales. For blue hydrogen, associated methane emissions can make hydrogen applications worse for the climate than fossil fuel technologies for several decades if emissions are high for both gases; however, blue hydrogen yields climate benefits over a 100-year period. While more work is needed to evaluate the warming impact of hydrogen emissions for specific end-use cases and value-chain pathways, it is clear that hydrogen emissions matter for the climate and warrant further attention from scientists, industry, and governments. This is critical to informing where and how to deploy hydrogen effectively in the emerging decarbonized global economy.

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Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climatechange scenarios

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, suchpotential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropo-genic climate change result in worldwide societal collapseor even eventual human extinction? At present, this is adangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are amplereasons to suspect that climate change could result in aglobal catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for theseextreme consequences could help galvanize action, improveresilience, and inform policy, including emergency respon-ses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood ofextreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about cat-astrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward aresearch agenda. The proposed agenda covers four mainquestions: 1) What is the potential for climate change todrive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanismsthat could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3)What  are  human  societies'  vulnerabilities  to  climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political insta-bility, and systemicfinancial risk? 4) How can these multiplestrands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an“integrated catastropheassessment”?Itistimeforthescientific community to grap-ple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophicclimate change

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How Fairness Principles in the Climate Debate Relate to Theories of Distributive Justice

A central question in international climate policy making is how to distribute the burdens of keeping global average temperature increase to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. In particular, there are four distributional issues: how to allocate the total amount of greenhouse gases that can still be emitted, who should bear the costs of mitigation, who should bear the costs of adaptation to unavoidable climate change, and who should bear the costs of residual climate damage. Regarding these distributional issues the academic literature offers a plethora of fairness principles, such as ‘polluter pays’, ‘beneficiary pays’, ‘equal per capita rights’, ‘grandfathering’, ‘ability to pay’, ‘historical responsibility’ and ‘cost effectiveness’. Remarkably, there is a theoretical gap between these principles and the central theories of distributive justice in moral and political philosophy. As a consequence, it is unclear how these principles are related, whether they can be combined or are mutually exclusive, and what the fundamental underlying values are. This paper aims to elucidate that debate. Understanding the different underlying values may facilitate bridge-building and movement in negotiation positions.

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The Pacific blue economy: An instrument of political maneuver

As large ocean states with aspirations for sustainable development, it comes as little surprise that Pacific Island nations have found appeal in the concept of the blue economy. This paper attempts to map the construction and mobilization of the blue economy concept in the Pacific Islands over the last ten years through case studies of three regional bodies: the Pacific Small Island Developing States grouping (PSIDS), the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF), and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). Rather than working to uncover some central definition or understanding of a Pacific blue economy, this paper frames the concept as a political tool that is mobilized by specific agents in response to specific challenges and in pursuit of specific goals. It is suggested that the blue economy has been engaged as an instrument of political maneuver by Pacific regional bodies, with these agents leveraging the concept across both regional and international platforms to advance their political and diplomatic interests. However, emerging observations also indicate a potential disconnect between the political effectiveness of this concept and its material reality, namely its ability to advance sustainable ocean development outcomes on the ground to the benefit of Pacific communities and ecosystems. Therefore, while the blue economy may present an attractive political tool for Pacific Islands agents, this paper suggests that greater scrutiny is required into the concept’s material value and virtue.

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e–talanoa as an online research method: extending vā–relations across spaces

Talanoa (Moana-centred orality) is a widely used Indigenous Pacific discursive approach within research contexts across the diaspora. In a globalised and technologically enhanced era, the online space continues to shape Moana (Oceania) peoples’ talanoa engagement and communication. e–talanoa in this article is an extension of talanoa research engagement and practice. We unpack the contexts in which e–talanoa is negotiated and made sense, and employ talanoa–vā (relational sense-making and meaning-making) as a critical analytical framework for interrogating and unpacking the complexities associated with e–talanoa as a Moana–Pacific research praxis. e–talanoa considers our current post–covid research space and how Pacific researchers navigate their ethical vā–relations within the temporal–spatial and physical–online boundaries that govern meaningful research undertakings. Being open about the challenges enables further understanding of the dynamic and fluid, yet contextually grounded spaces in which e–talanoa as a method can be realised.

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