Project description
Balancing growth and greed
Economic growth often comes with environmental costs known as externalities. From air pollution to flooding, the impacts of these environmental pressures tend to fall most heavily on the poorest communities. Understanding and accounting for these effects is essential to ensure that the risks do not undermine the very progress that growth is meant to deliver. The ERC-funded EXTGROW project aims to measure key environmental damage in low-income countries. Using detailed georeferenced data and spatial modelling, researchers are examining key areas ranging from how air pollution influences the benefits from new roads in Pakistan to how anti-poverty programmes in Bangladesh can reduce vulnerability to climate shocks. EXTGROW provides evidence to help design trade transport and insurance policies that support growth.
Objective
The burden of local and global externalities from growth - such as pollution, congestion and climate change - falls mainly on the poorest across and within countries. EXTGROW will break new ground by offering novel insights into the magnitude and distribution of key externalities in low income countries, and the design of policies that balance the dual imperatives of shielding vulnerable populations and continued growth. It is distinctive in five ways: (1) georeferenced data from innovative sources; (2) frontier spatial equilibrium modelling and econometric methods; (3) aggregate effects of externalities at scale; (4) informing transport, trade and social protection policy design; (5) focus on inequality.
The proposed research comprises six projects across two themes which consider respectively the management of local and global externalities. The first theme considers how local externalities alter assessments of the aggregate and distributional impacts of trade facilitation, which is key for the design of transport and trade policies. The first project will examine how traffic pollution in Pakistan influences estimates of the gains from road building. The second assesses whether banning trade in waste products improves welfare when externalities from disposal are heterogeneous across space. The third estimates the impacts of public transit in Tanzania for alleviating congestion costs across income groups. The second theme studies how vulnerable populations respond to the global externalities from climate change and how policy can support these adaptive adjustments. The fourth project will draw on the rollout of a big-push anti-poverty program in Bangladesh to understand whether it can shield beneficiaries from climate shocks. The fifth studies how targeting of public adaptation investments in Pakistan should respond to firms’ private adaptation. The sixth will test whether sovereign natural disaster insurance in the Philippines induces moral hazard in adaptation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences environmental sciences pollution
- social sciences social geography transport
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
WC2A 2AE London
United Kingdom
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.