Economic benefits of working from home you may not know

Photo by Dillon Shook on Unsplash

Since the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic, a sizeable amount of workers across many countries have taken up working from home as the new normal. Studies have shown that a sizeable number would prefer to continue working from home even if their respective workplaces reopen.

Much of the economic argument behind supporting working from home, albeit disputed, revolves around increased worker productivity, environmental benefits and an outflow from big city areas reducing city budget strains. 

However, there are more economic arguments supporting working from home as the new normal that have not been prevalent in the news. Here are a few that are worth mentioning.

How do environmental, socioeconomic, and political factors affect local environmental policy decisions?

Over a year ago, together with Professor Katarina Elofsson, we published an academic paper on the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. 

Link to paper

What was the objective of the article?

The objective our study was straightforward. In the context of Sweden, the national government enacts national policy for protection of surface water quality. Municipalities then must decide whether to enact local policies (environmental targets and action plans) to go beyond those set on the national level and to take policy decisions at the regional or local level as required by the EU Water Framework Directive. Municipalities also may decide to allocate these decisions to a responsible authority. This presents the research question:

We assess how environmental, socioeconomic, and political factors, as well as the availability of environmental expertise, affect these municipal decisions.

Choosing the right policy to tackle climate change – the all-important issue

Climate change, a concept deemed an alarmist theory thirty years ago, is now forefront in policy construction for governments worldwide where climate change is a classic market failure. This being as consumers and industries make decisions that are environmentally harmful because the benefits from this behavior (e.g. car usage) outweigh the costs (e.g. price of fuel or renewable energy source).

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46384067

Despite increased urgency to address the problems of climate change, deep divisions still exist over what form climate change measures should take. The following goes over three of the most popular environmental policy measures to tackle climate change: carbon taxes, tech-focused innovation and cap-and-trade.