Wasted in waste? The benefits of switching from taxes to Pay-as-you-throw fees: the Italian case
Giovanna Messina () and
Antonella Tomasi
No 584, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area
Abstract:
Solid waste management is one of the most important functions performed by Italian municipalities and is mostly financed through local property taxes. Alternative financing schemes, known as ‘pay-as-you throw’ (PAYT), are designed to price each additional unit of waste and are becoming increasingly frequent at international level. Their advantages in terms of efficiency and equity, as well as of care for the environment, have been investigated both theoretically and empirically. This paper estimates the impact of PAYT schemes on the amount of waste produced and on the costs of its disposal for Italian municipalities. Results show that PAYT schemes deeply affect user behavior: total waste decreases (unsorted waste almost halves). Overall, the costs incurred by municipalities adopting PAYT fall by roughly 10 to 20 per cent in per capita terms, reflecting a reduction of one third in the cost of managing undifferentiated waste.
Keywords: pay-as-you-throw; municipal solid waste management; policy evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 H23 H71 Q53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-eur, nep-pub and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2020-0584/QEF_584_20.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Wasted in waste? The benefits of switching from taxes to Pay-As-You-Throw fees: The Italian case (2021) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_584_20
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().