绿色转型的货币政策

by Luca Fornaro, Veronica Guerrieri andLucrezia Reichlin Monetary and Economic Department September 2025 JEL classification: E52, E58, E61, O44. Keywords: Monetary policy, green transition, inflation,directed technological change. TheviewsexpressedarethoseoftheauthorsandnotnecessarilytheviewsoftheBIS. This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org). ©Bank for International Settlements 2025. All rights reserved. Brief excerpts may bereproduced or translated provided the source is stated. Monetary policy for the green transition1 Luca Fornaro (CREI), Veronica Guerrieri (University of Chicago) andLucrezia Reichlin (London Business School) April 2025 Chapter 1: Introduction Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing our planet today,leading to severe environmental and social repercussions. Rising global temperaturesare causing glaciers to melt, sea levels to rise and extreme weather events to becomemore frequent and intense. This results in floods, droughts and hurricanes thatthreaten ecosystems and human livelihoods alike. The urgent need for action is clear,as the longer we delay addressing these issues, the more irreversible the damage toour planet and future generations will become. This recognition has promptedcountries worldwide to embrace proposals aimed at promoting a green transition,thatis,a structural transformation of our economies away from pollutingtechnologies and towards clean ones. A range of different policies have been implemented to promote the greentransition all over the world. In particular, Europe has shown a strong commitment tosustainability and climate action. The European Green Deal is a comprehensiveframework aimed at making the EU climate-neutral by 2050, encompassing initiativeslike reducing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting renewable energy and enhancingenergy efficiency. Other countries have started phase out carbon emissions or planto do so, through a combination of carbon taxes and regulatory constraints on theuse of dirty energy sources. Although the long-term benefits of the green transition are extreme and evident,there is more discussion about what the costs of the transition are in the short term,how to mitigate them without slowing the transition down and how the greentransition affects different policy decisions. In this report, we explore how the greentransition affects the traditional monetary policy objectives of maintaining pricestability while sustainingeconomic activity, and how different monetary policydecisions affect the green transition. Our analysis thus remains neutral regardingwhether central banks should actively pursue “green policies”. Instead, we focus onunveiling mechanisms that are relevant to policymakers regardless of the central bankstance on the green transition. After reviewing some of the facts on the green transition reported in the existingliterature, we present some new empirical results. First, we want to understand themacroeconomic impact of restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. To this end, weperform a vector autoregression (VAR) analysis using European data to document themacroeconomic effect of increases in the price of natural gas. We find that a rise intheprice of gas increases inflation,while depressing economic activity andemployment.Ahighercostofusingfossilfuelsthusworsenstheinflation/employment trade-off faced by the central bank. Our results are in line withKänzig (2023), who shows that tighter limits on carbon emissions allowed by the EUEmission Trading System (ETS) lead to higher inflation and lower economic activity.These findings suggest that the green transition, and in particular the associatedrestrictions on the use of fossil fuels, will most likely push central banks into a moreinflationary environment. We then turn to an empirical analysis of the effects of monetary interventions.Again using a VAR approach and European data, we confirm the conventional viewthat monetary contractions are able to pull down inflation, but at the cost of lowereconomic activity and higher unemployment. Moreover, we show that monetarycontractions have a particularly depressive impact on gas prices. This result hints atthe fact that tight monetary policy may slow down the green transition, by makingfossil fuels less expensive and reducing the incentives for private agents to phasethem out in favour of renewable energy sources. While green regulations that constrain the use of polluting technologies fosterthe green transition, the associated structural reallocation of the economy will causeproductivitylosses,at least in the short term.Advances in renewable powertechnologies and green capital investments will be crucial to reconcile a healthy greentransitionwith long-run growth.Interestingly,green investments seem to beparticularly reliant on external financing, and highly sensitive to changes in financingconditions (Martin et al (2024)). To understand how monetary policy will shape theenergy