Ebru Voyvoda

Ebru Voyvoda is a member of the International Advisory Council of Istanbul Policy Center-Sabancı University-Stiftung Mercator Initative. She is also a faculty member in the Department of Economics in Middle East Technical University since September 2004. She was a 2022/23 Mercator-IPC Fellow at IPC. She received her MS and PhD degrees in Economics at Bilkent University in 1998 and 2003, respectively. She was a post-doc researcher at the University of Utah, Department of Economics in 2003–2004.

Ebru visited the Environmental and Resource Economics, Environmental Management Department at the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, Germany, in 2011–2012 to conduct research on the intergenerational impacts of environmental policies. In 2015–2016 she was affiliated with UNCTAD, the Division of Globalization and Development Strategies, where she worked on industrialization and structural transformation in developing economies. Her research focuses on applied modeling for policy analysis, energy-environment-economics modeling and contemporary issues in economic policy.

Project: “Distributional Implications of Decarbonization and Policy Design: Turkish Case”

Turkey ratified the Paris Agreement in October 2021 and declared 2053 as the target year to achieve net-zero emissions. Since the announcement of this rather unanticipated development on the policy front, there has been considerable discussion and effort to appraise the net-zero target as a comprehensive framework. It is clear that de-carbonization efforts toward net-zero will span a range of strategies and policy decisions over a set of critical sectors including energy (power) supply, transportation, industry, and households.

This project aims to contribute to these discussions by assessing the possible distributional impacts of carbon pricing as one key decarbonization policy toward Turkey’s 2053 net-zero target. As carbon pricing policies can have widely varying distributional impacts, the assessment would require thorough evaluation and detailed representation of heterogenous household groups in terms of income and expenditure patterns. A comprehensive perception of the distributional impacts shall serve as a precondition to further design (fiscal/incomes) policy alternatives to respond to poverty and equity concerns within the general framework of climate targets. Therefore, the objective of this research is to contribute to the current climate policy-making discussions in Turkey regarding the bi-directional relationship between socio-economic implications and climate (carbon pricing) policies.