Tag: OECD

With the mercury topping 39C this year, the risk to athletes is obvious. The schedules of multi-billion dollar televised sports -- such as the English Premier League -- now make that impossible. Yoshiro Mori, president of the Organizing Committee for the Olympics and a former prime minister, recently recommended the idea to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. At first sight, the prospect appears attractive. The trouble is that research in countries that have introduced DST has found smaller benefits than the moral improvers advertise. Japan endured a four-year experiment with DST during the American occupation after World War II. When the Americans left, the Japanese government abolished it. The number of Japanese engaged in agriculture has declined to a tiny proportion of the population, but the booming alcoholic drinks and night-time entertainment industries could suffer. Perhaps what Tokyo 2020 needs is a special "Olympic time zone" that would apply to athletes, officials and media, but not to uninvolved Japanese, who would not need to put their watches forward. The marathon could start at 5 a.m. Olympic time, which might be 7 a.m. Japan time.

The election season is not always the best time for mulling over desired policy changes. But then considering what is happening to the US and to multilateralism, it goes to show that even developed countries can sometimes become captive to a demagogue who can ignore institutional restraints. This is what a recent OECD report tries to point out (Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth, OECD, 2017) But what is seldom known is that for most countries, increase in GDP invariably results in reduced carbon emissions. As the OECD report puts it, “Climate-compatible infrastructure investment needs are only 10% higher and can be offset with fuel savings . Government-owned Coal India is a major employer, and it wouldn’t make sense for the government to put powerful coal unions on the warpath. This is despite the fact that agriculture needs to change quickly because it could be the worst affected by climate change. As the OECD report points out, the “negative impacts of climate change on yields of crops such as wheat and maize have been more common than positive impacts. But that might end up as a pious hope that many might cherish for a long time. Expect policymakers to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the policy tables immediately after elections are over, to craft out new policies. But much of it will come from the sense of self-preservation that is very strong among politicians.