O44 - Environment and GrowthReturn

Climate change and climate neutrality targets for 2050 in the case of the EU bring the need for effective environmental policy instruments. Environmental taxes, green innovations, carbon pricing, emission allowances and other instruments are attracting increasing attention in academic as well as economic and environmental policy debates. This paper provides a detailed review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of policy instruments in the path towards climate neutrality, in particular on the effectiveness of environmental taxes, innovations, and established policies across the globe. A separate section also examines the two most widely used approaches for putting a price on carbon – carbon taxes and emission allowances. Environmental policy instruments are combined, however, none of them alone contributes to significant environmental improvements, as confirmed by several major studies. But stricter regulation and improved instruments go a long way towards achieving climate neutrality.

Paper deals with the effects of inflation on business management and the ways of expressing them in financial statements from a historical point of view. It points to the constructions of classical balance sheet theories, which arose as a reaction to the development of inflation in Germany after the First World War, with special attention to one of them: the organic balance sheet theory Schmidt’s, first published a hundred years ago. The organic balance sheet is in many respects the predecessor of the contemporary reporting of value data mainly in the proper (real) price [fair value], with the fact that Schmidt also derived the determination of the "correct" income from the current prices (Tageswert). The issue of the variable purchasing power of the monetary unit is still alive, as is the effort to deal with this phenomenon within the framework of financial reporting. At the end of the twentieth century, complex accounting valuation models created in Europe and the USA, built on dynamic reporting principles together with the use of sophisticated calculations to determine reported values. The issue supplements a small illustrative example, using methodology from the USA.