CCCCEP II: The political economics of climate finance 1990-2014

CCCEP was established in October 2008 with the aim of advancing public and private action on climate change through rigorous, innovative research. Our five research themes for Phase Two are: 1. Understanding green growth and climate-compatible development: what could constitute green growth or climate-compatible development in industrialised and developing countries? 2. Advancing climate finance and investment: how can we unlock major flows of finance into both adaptation and mitigation in different contexts? What are the implications of such flows? 3. Evaluating the performance of climate policies: how can we assess the performance of different climate policies and how can we understand the scope for policy learning? 4. Managing climate risks and uncertainties and strengthening climate services: how can we promote new approaches to the assessment, management and communication of climate risks/uncertainties? 5. Enabling rapid transitions in mitigation and adaptation: how can we understand the scope for rapid transitions to dramatically cut emissions and adapt to significant climate change? Beyond the planned scientific programme, we set up a CCCEP Innovation Fund with the aim of stimulating, developing and disseminating innovative ideas from both the academic and practitioner communities. Our plans for Phase Two build on the solid institutional foundations of Phase One, including CCCEP's position at LSE/Leeds, its management structure and its key staff. DATA DESCRIPTION (ABSTRACT) This data deposition is linked to several empirical papers that explain the passage of climate change legislation (measured as the number of laws passed in country i in year t) as a function of different political economy factors. Each observation is a country-year (e.g. UK in 2008) for which we record the number of climate laws passed in that year (1 UK law passed: the 2008 Climate Change Act). (In some specifications the dependent variable is a yes-no dummy, depending on whether any laws were passed). The passage of new climate legislation in a country-year is a function of the stock of existing laws in that country and elsewhere, economic factors such as the business cycle and political factors such as the strength of government. All the variables used in the work are in publicly available databases (see attached read-me file for details). This includes "Climate Change Laws of the World", a dataset on climate change policy and legislation, as well as political / economic data sets such as the "Database of Political Institutions", Polity IV and IMF Statistical data. They are not included in this submission. What is included is the computer codes (STATA do files) underlying the two main published papers.