Climate Policies in Dependent Market Economies: The Case of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic

Global warming has become a household term, and so has climate policy. The move from obscurity to widely accepted fact was a long one that was met with - and to a significant degree is still met with - suspicion. It seems fair however, to say that these terms have become accepted within the political mainstream. Moreover, a widely held impression has taken hold that the globe can already feel the effects of the rise in global temperature, even though these effects are distributed very unevenly. Political and economic actors who only care about the present, and thus have short time horizons, do not worry much about the future state of the economy. In contrast, forward-looking economic actors why by nature of their operations, like pension and investment funds, are dealing with the future and thus have longer time horizons started to get worried.