One of the concerns frequently expressed about climate change policies, is that if we reduce and restrict carbon emissions in the UK, then energy intensive manufacturing will simply shut down and move to other countries.

Some fascinating research, via Ryan Avent, suggests that this may not be the case.

Ralf Martin, Laure de Preux, and Ulrich Wagner published a really interesting paper investigating the effects of the UK’s climate change levy (CCL) and climate change agreements (CCA) on manufacturing firms production of goods, energy use and carbon emissions.

They used data on individual firms from the Office of National Statistics, and found: