Person:
Golub, Alexander

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Capital markets, Environmental risk analsyis, Economics of climate change, Energy economics, Development economics
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0000-0002-3586-1447
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ResearchGate
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Last updated: May 8, 2025
Biography
Alexander has a working experience in academia, NGOs, investment banking and consulting business. After a research appointment at Harvard University in 1998, he worked as a Senior Economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. As the Executive Director for Global Environmental Markets at UBS, he conducted a quantitative analysis of global capital markets in the context of pricing carbon emissions and equity formation in response to global and regional climate policy. At present, Alexander Golub teaches Environmental Risk at American University and serves as a consultant to the World Bank, Environmental Defense Fund and Resources For the Future. His research focuses on risks and opportunities of the emerging global climate policy and transformations of the global capital markets. He proposed several innovative ideas related to the application of real options for benefit-cost analysis of the global climate policy and calculation of the value of information, and to use call options on REDD+ to bridge the future demand and current supply of offsets from avoided deforestation. Alexander formulated an innovative approach to engage carbon dependent countries to participate in the global climate policy. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed books and papers. Alexander Golub graduated from Moscow State University in 1982 and was awarded his Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics in 1984.

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2020 - 202532000 - 20193
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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Innovative Financial Instruments and Their Role in the Development of Jurisdictional REDD+
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-08) Golub, Alexander; Hanusch, Marek; Bardal, Diogo; Keith, Bruce Ian; Simon, Daniel Navia; Fleischhaker, Cornelius
    Achieving global net zero carbon emissions requires stopping deforestation and making full use of tropical forests as carbon sinks. Market instruments for the sale and purchase of emission outcomes coming from Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation framework programs could play a very significant role in achieving this goal. The development of these markets has been insufficient so far: their scale as of today is much lower than what would be required to generate meaningful resources for the countries that host tropical forests, and the quality of existing instruments is generally insufficient to allow a scaling up in demand. However, efforts to improve the transparency and integrity of these instruments are accelerating, particularly around jurisdictional Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation framework programs. In parallel with these efforts, innovations in financial instruments suited for the framework’s carbon markets are also taking place, but their scale is limited so far. This paper looks beyond the current state of the framework’s carbon markets to consider a set of innovative financial instruments that would allow completing the infrastructure of emissions trading, enhancing its utility for both issuers and buyers of carbon credits in the framework’s jurisdictional programs. The paper shows how a combination of forest carbon bonds, where countries sell forward (or commit) their emission reduction outcomes, as well as call and put options can be used to de-risk and encourage early investment in jurisdictional Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation framework programs. To quantify the value of these innovations, the paper evaluates the potential scale of these instruments for the case of Brazil. The estimates suggest that the amounts that could be mobilized would represent a critical contribution to effective forest conservation. The proposed instruments and methods can be used by other tropical nations that are prepared to implement a large-scale jurisdictional program. Although the paper acknowledges that the current state of carbon markets would still not allow their deployment in the short term, the conclusion is that these instruments have significant potential, and their future development could be an important contribution to the establishment of successful markets for the conservation of tropical forests.
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    Diversification and Cooperation in a Decarbonizing World: Climate Strategies for Fossil Fuel-Dependent Countries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-07-02) van der Mensbrugghe, Dominique; Peszko, Grzegorz; Ward, John; Golub, Alexander; Zenghelis, Dimitri; Marijs, Cor; Schopp, Anne; Rogers, John A.; Midgley, Amelia
    This book is the first stocktaking of what the decarbonization of the world economy means for fossil fuel–dependent countries. These countries are the most exposed to the impacts of global climate policies and, at the same time, are often unprepared to manage them. They depend on the export of oil, gas, or coal; the use of carbon-intensive infrastructure (for example, refineries, petrochemicals, and coal power plants); or both. Fossil fuel–dependent countries face financial, fiscal, and macro-structural risks from the transition of the global economy away from carbon-intensive fuels and the value chains based on them. This book focuses on managing these transition risks and harnessing related opportunities. Diversification and Cooperation in a Decarbonizing World identifies multiple strategies that fossil fuel–dependent countries can pursue to navigate the turbulent waters of a low-carbon transition. The policy and investment choices to be made in the next decade will determine these countries’ degree of exposure and overall resilience. Abandoning their comfort zones and developing completely new skills and capabilities in a time frame consistent with the Paris Agreement on climate change is a daunting challenge and requires long-term revenue visibility and consistent policy leadership. This book proposes a constructive framework for climate strategies for fossil fuel–dependent countries based on new approaches to diversification and international climate cooperation. Climate policy leaders share responsibility for creating room for all countries to contribute to the goals of the Paris Agreement, taking into account the specific vulnerabilities and opportunities each country faces.
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    Diversification and Cooperation Strategies in a Decarbonizing World
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) van der Mensbrugghe, Dominique; Peszko, Grzegorz; Golub, Alexander
    Fossil fuel importers can apply various climate and trade taxes to encourage fossil fuel–dependent countries to cooperate on climate mitigation, and fossil fuel–dependent countries can respond with alternative diversification and cooperation strategies. This paper runs macroeconomic model simulations of alternative strategies that the global community and fossil fuel–dependent countries can pursue to encourage and enable their participation in a global low-carbon transition. The following are the findings from the simulations. (i) Fuel importers’ unilateral carbon taxes capture fossil fuel–dependent countries’ resource rents and accelerate their emission-intensive diversification. (ii) Border taxes on the carbon content of imports from fossil fuel–dependent countries do not induce comprehensive cooperation, but broader trade sanctions do. (iii) Cooperative wellhead carbon taxes can achieve cooperation without trade wars. (iv) Lower-income fossil fuel–dependent countries with large untapped reserves need additional incentives and enablers to cooperate and diversify into low-carbon assets. (v) Incentives to cooperate are misaligned between different fossil fuel–dependent countries and between owners of different fuels. (vi) The strategies that maximize consumption and growth in fossil fuel–dependent countries reduce the value of assets in extractive and heavy industries. (vii) Asset diversification is a robust, long-term strategy but faces the tragedy of the horizon.
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    Effect of Climate Policies on Labor Markets in Developing Countries: Review of the Evidence and Directions for Future Research
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-02) Hafstead, Marc; Williams, Robert C., III; Golub, Alexander; Meijer, Siet; Narayanan, Badri G.; Nyamweya, Kevin; Steinbuks, Jevgenijs
    This study surveys one of the critical welfare aspects of contemplating climate policies in developing countries and their potential effect on workers and labor markets. The existing body of evidence finds that climate policies will likely cause a significant reduction of jobs in fossil-fuel industries. These industries make up a relatively small share of total employment, even in fossil-fuel-intensive countries. Therefore, the effect on aggregate employment will likely be small, especially over the long term, since there will be offsetting gains in other industries. However, most of the literature ignores the key features of developing country labor markets and may significantly misrepresent the dynamics of labor market adjustment to climate policies.
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    Economic Structural Change as an Option for Mitigating the Impacts of Climate Change
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04) Toman, Michael; Golub, Alexander
    Improving the resilience of the economy in the face of uncertain climate change damages involves irreversible investments to scale up new technologies that are less vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The benefit of having such options includes the avoided welfare cost of diverting consumption to scaling up the new technology after production possibilities have been diminished by climate change impacts. This needs to be balanced against the upfront cost of scaling up a technology that is potentially less productive than incumbent technologies. The paper uses a real options approach to investigate this trade-off, based on numerical simulation of a multi-period model of economic growth and climate change impacts that includes a one-time cost associated with scaling up the alternative technology. The value of the option provided by investment in the more resilient technology depends on the ex-ante volatility of climate change damages, as well as how rapidly climate change degrades the productivity of the economy's established technology. In addition, the size of scale-up cost that leaves the economy indifferent between investing and not investing in the new technology can be used to define the value of early investment in the less climate change–vulnerable technology as a sort of call option.
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    Climate Change, Industrial Transformation, and "Development Traps"
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06) Toman, Michael; Golub, Alexander
    This paper examines the possibility of environmental "development traps," or "brown poverty traps," caused by interactions between the impacts of climate change and increasing returns in the development of "clean-technology" sectors. A simple specification is used in which the economy can produce a single homogeneous consumption good with two different technologies. In the "old" sector, technology has global diminishing returns to scale and depends on the use of fossil energy that gives rise to long-lived, damaging climate change. In the "new" sector, the technology has convex-concave production and is not dependent on the polluting energy input. If the new sector does not grow fast enough to move through the phase of increasing returns, then the economy may linger at a low level of income indefinitely or it may achieve greater progress but then get driven back down to a lower level of income by environmental degradation. Stimulating growth in the new sector thus may be a key element for avoiding an environmental poverty trap and achieving higher, sustained income levels.