Brian O’Callaghan

Green recovery spending. Reorienting our economies to industries that will drive future growth

This is only important if you care about the future post-covid.

Today’s guest at Sustainability@Work is Brian O’Callaghan, Lead Researcher and Project Manager of the Oxford University Economic Recovery Project. He is an Australian Rhodes Scholar, Associate at the Boston Consulting Group, and Consultant at the Robertson Foundation, covering topics in Energy and the Environment.
He is also a consultant to government and business groups on issues relating to the energy and climate transitions.

Brian’s core research concerns the economic impacts of fiscal spending. He is particularly interested in the role that green spending initiatives can have in times of economic contraction and in 2020 co-authored the seminal work Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change? .

His supplementary research interests include the economics of green hydrogen and methods for reducing perceived risk in renewable energy finance. He is a doctoral candidate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, supervised by Professor Cameron Hepburn.

Brian holds a Bachelor of Engineering (University Medal and First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Commerce (Finance and International Business), both from the University of Sydney.

Here are some interesting links to his work and the work of the Economic Recovery Project>

     ● Global Recovery Observatory: here
     ● New Report: Are We Building Back Better? by O’Callaghan and Murdock 2021 here
     ● Launch event recording: here
     ● 2020 Paper: Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change? by Hepburn et al. 2020 here
     ● A recent article with Brian on Australia green recovery spending was on the Guardian.

And here are some good suggestions from Brian on how to go deeper into the topic>

     ● Book: Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis by Kyla Tienhaara
     ● Paper: Five Lessons from COVID-19 for Advancing Climate Change Mitigation by Klenert et al. 2020 here
     ● IMF Blog: How Governments Can Create a Green, Job-rich Global Recovery by Georgieva and Shah 2020 here

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