The CLIMREC Dataset on Green Economic Recovery Spending offers researchers, practitioners, and students a new comprehensive resource for understanding how economic crises impact climate policy across the world. The CLIMREC dataset was collected in response to increasing efforts by national governments to leverage economic recessions for promoting green economic growth. The dataset tracks the fiscal spending of 40 of the world’s largest economies in direct response to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. It includes information about the greenhouse gas emissions profile of these countries’ economic recovery packages in the periods 2008-2010 and 2020-2022.
With its uniquely comprehensive data spanning a broad range of countries and two macroeconomic crises, the CLIMREC dataset provides new insights into the scale of countries’ investment-based climate policies, the impact of crises on climate politics, and the pace of the global energy transition. It also allows researchers to examine questions such as whether economic crises add to (or detract from) decarbonization efforts, the extent to which governments prioritize climate in their recovery strategies, why some governments prioritize climate more than others, and what drives green growth.
Use this website to explore and compare countries’ economic recovery spending across the two crises.