Greener and Fairer: A Progressive Environmental Tax Reform for Spain

Environmental externalities call for the use of environmental taxes to get prices right and thereby reduce environmental pressures. To date, however, the Spanish government makes only limited use of environmental taxes. One major reason for the policy reluctance are concerns on the regressive impact...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Boehringe;, Christoph, García-Muros, X., González-Eguino, Mikel
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universidad del País Vasco
Repositorio:Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación
OAI Identifier:oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/47411
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10810/47411
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Environmental tax reform
household incidence
computable general equilibrium
microsimulation
Descripción
Sumario:Environmental externalities call for the use of environmental taxes to get prices right and thereby reduce environmental pressures. To date, however, the Spanish government makes only limited use of environmental taxes. One major reason for the policy reluctance are concerns on the regressive impacts of environmental taxes. We argue that policy can hedge against these concerns by means of revenue recycling. More specifically, we assess the impacts of a green tax reform where additional revenues are redistributed lump-sum to Spanish households on an equal-per-capita basis. Based on quantitative evidence from coupled micrasimulation and computable equilibrium analyses we find that such a green tax reform leads to a substantial reduction in harmful emissions while having a progressive impact.