Sustainable Prosperity's Research

For decades, economists have known that our markets have significant flaws. Costs and benefits that are externalized from market transactions, as well as “missing markets”, cause environmental harm and economic inefficiencies. 

Sustainable Prosperity works with a wide range of experts and partners to produce and distribute quality, accessible research on market flaws and appropriate policy solutions.  Our policy and research clusters are:

 

Research Papers

A Simple Approach for Bettering the Environment and the Economy: Restructuring the Federal Fuel Excise Tax

Broadening the federal excise tax to reflect environmental costs would result in substantial new revenues to the federal government that could be used to reduce inefficient taxes in the economy. This report provides the rationale for this revenue-neutral tax proposal, and discusses how such environmental taxation can be useful in improving the overall tax structure to achieve cost-effective environmental protection.

State of Knowledge on Market Tools for Sustainable Communities

In this report, Sean Calvert identifies examples of ‘best practices’ for Environmental Pricing Reform (EPR) strategies in Canadian municipalities. These examples reflect where EPR strategies have been implemented and have effectively achieved some environmental goal. The ultimate goal in identifying these ‘best practices’ is to identify key factors that have led to their success or any other lessons for other jurisdictions currently considering some form of EPR strategy.

 
The main findings for this report are as follows:
  • Despite the number of effective EPR strategies that have been identified, EPR strategies remain, for the most part, underutilized in Canadian municipalities;

Smart Budget: A Background Paper on Environmental Pricing Reform for Local Governments

The Smart Budget report has been prepared to help community leaders in both the public and private sector gain a practical understanding of the potential role for environmental pricing reform (EPR) in building sustainable communities. It seeks to facilitate a dialogue among all key community interests on identifying opportunities to address local government priorities through a mix of EPR policy instruments.

Building Public Support for Market-Based Environmental Policies

 “Governments that have expressed a commitment to stopping climate change have found their effort frustrated…because they know that inside their electors there is a small but insistent voice asking them to both try and fail.”

Sustainable Prosperity's “Eight Principles for Pricing Carbon”

With Canadian governments poised to move forward on climate change laws in the near future, SP has released a list of the key principles needed for effective carbon pricing – whether through a carbon tax or cap and trade. The report, based on a year-long dialogue among top economic, business and environment leaders, also evaluates and ranks existing carbon laws and proposals across the country against these principles. 

"Hybrid" Carbon Pricing: Issues to Consider When Taxes and Cap-and-Trade Systems Interact

Two different types of carbon pricing are emerging in Canada: carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. Where the two might exist in the same jurisdiction, the implications have not been closely considered. In this report, economist Robert Joshi seeks to anticipate some of the issues a "hybrid" approach might present.

Building A Green Economic Stimulus Package for Canada

“Building a Green Economic Stimulus Package for Canada” is a new SP report that ranks 23 stimulus ideas based on their economic AND environmental impacts.

Many Canadian policy-makers are intensely focused on developing effective ways to protect and revitalize the Canadian economy.  And many organizations and experts are encouraging them to see the current crisis as an opportunity to invest in building a more sustainable economy.  Given the abundance of different positions in the debate about potential economic stimulus instruments, there is a clear need for a consistent, logical framework to analyze and evaluate different approaches.

Pricing Electricity for Sustainability: Climate Change and Canada's Electricity Sector

Electricity pricing in Canada fails to fully reflect costs – and a price on carbon will only address part of the problem. As a result, investments in generation and transmission are not optimal, consumption choices are distorted and environmental outcomes are much worse than necessary.
 
This paper examines how more consistent prices across electricity markets would lead to significant economic, environmental and social gains.  It provides an overview of provincial electricity markets regulation, institutions and key indicators (price levels, production and transmission capacity, production, emissions) and briefly describes a few international trends in electricity sector integration (Nordic countries, EU, the 2007 Australian National Electricity Market). It will discuss important barriers to change and how they might be addressed. 
 
Click here for the full document.

Fiscal Reform for Social and Environmental Objectives

This background report (attached) prepared by The Pembina Institute For Appropriate Development for SP, provides background information on environmentally oriented fiscal reform policies. There are three main components to the report. The first section describes the main arguments for pursuing fiscal reform to better integrate environmental costs and benefits into transaction prices. The second section presents experience with fiscal reform in various regions around the world, including Canada, the United States and Europe.

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