The Relative Strength of Economic Interests in Shaping Eu Climate Policy: A Hypothesis

It is assumed that interest groups strongly influence climate policy implementation in the EU. This assumption helps to explain the observed growing gap between the EU policy rhetoric — pressing for strong policies at the international level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a lack of implementation at both the EU and domestic levels. The few implemented instruments tend to be inefficient. To prevent this gap from becoming unbridgeable, it is of interest to know how the weight of different economic interests, and hence their likely policy influence, may evolve. Using data on value-added, production and employment, it can be shown that as the importance of emission intensive sectors declines, sectors benefiting from climate policy are likely to gain in importance. However, the absolute importance of the former sectors is still much larger than that of the latter, suggesting that resistance to implementation will remain considerable for the foreseeable future.