What works and who pays? A data-driven study of the economic subsidies transforming the energy sector.

Research Project, 2021 – 2024

he goal of the project is to study the effectiveness and distributional effects of different types of economic subsidies within the energy sector. The purpose of the project is to provide a high level, data-driven view with a broader scope than previous studies -as exiting knowledge is either country or sector specific or ignores distributional effects.
The project will start with data collection of the different economic subsidies in the electricity, transport and industrial sectors in relevant EU countries. Subsequently, two quantitative methods will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the subsidies as well as how the cost of financing them and benefits from them is distributed in society. Following this, the results from the analysis will be used to choose case studies that focus on specific countries, sectors or policies and that will provide more detailed explanations of relevant results. The results will be used to evaluate how future economic policies in the energy sector could be designed, financed and eventually phased out, to be effective in reducing emissions while being economically fair and publicly accepted. This may be based on highlighting policies that have worked well in the past, including under what circumstances they have worked, but could also include finding gaps in what is needed and using evidence from the gathered data to suggest new types of policy designs.