Resources

In March, subsidy research organisation Earth Track released a new report, EIA Energy Subsidy Estimates: A review of assumptions and omissions, which analyses why the United States' Energy Information Administration (EIA) underestimates the true cost of federal energy subsidies.

From the outside, the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) may look immutable. The only major effect of the reform passed by farm ministers in 2009, dubbed the ‘Health Check', was to dissipate more serious ambitions for change for the rest of the EU long-term budget (2007–2013).

In just four years the Indian government has had three high-level committees recommend how petroleum product prices should be determined. All three have shared the same general conclusions: the government should reform fuel-price subsidies and use other, more effective policies to improve the welfare of the poor. But the reality behind India's reluctance to liberalize prices is not a lack of good policy advice.

The Global Subsidies Initiative has released the latest in its series of policy briefs, an analysis of the Global Fund's 'Affordable Medicines Facility - malaria', or AMFm, a program designed to make costly malaria treatments affordable across the world, at the same time as aiming to avoid the negative impacts often caused by subsidies.

At an impressive 834 pages, Renewable Energy Government Incentive Programs, released in February by Energy Business Reports (EBR), offers an in-depth look at the United States’ many programs supporting renewable energy.

In February, the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (VTPI) published a report which argues that urban households in the United States could save money overall if taxes were raised to pay for better public transport.

A number of subsidy identification and analysis tools developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have been road-tested by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), in a report published November last year called Environmentally Harmful Subsidies: Identification and Assessment.

In February, the International Monetary Foundation released a Staff Position Note on the size and impact of fossil-fuel subsidies, and the need for their reform, Petroleum Product Subsidies: Costly, Inequitable, and Rising. The report notes that as fossil-fuel prices continue to increase, so will the fiscal burden on subsidizing states. It estimates that in 2010 the global value of fossil-fuel subsidies will be either US$ 250 or US$ 740 billion, depending on the method of estimation.

Lessons learned from the restructuring of Poland’s coal-mining industry, written by Professor Wojciech Suwala of the Mineral and Energy Economy Research Institute, analyses how the reform of subsidies to coal mining was conducted as Poland moved from a centrally planned to a market economy. The report describes in detail the various stages in the reform process and the annual spending on each form of compensatory measure: in total around US$ 9.3 billion between 1990 and 2006, the most substantial spending having been dedicated to social programs for workers.

The United States' Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently acknowledged that, despite generous levels of taxpayer funding, cellulosic ethanol was not scaling up as quickly as they had hoped. So they reduced the 2010 cellulosic ethanol mandate from 100 million gallons to 6.5 million gallons.