Who Bears the Economic Costs of Environmental Regulations?

Don Fullerton () and Erich Muehlegger

No 6596, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Public economics has a well-developed literature on tax incidence – the ultimate burdens from tax policy. This literature is used here to describe not only the distributional effects of environmental taxes or subsidies but also the likely incidence of non-tax regulations, energy efficiency standards, or other environmental mandates. Recent papers find that mandates can be more regressive than carbon taxes. We also describe how the distributional effects of such policies can be altered by various market conditions such as limited factor mobility, trade exposure, evasion, corruption, or imperfect competition. Finally, we review data on carbon-intensity of production and exports around the world in order to describe implications for effects of possible carbon taxation on countries with different levels of income per capita.

Keywords: distributional effects; carbon tax; environmental policy; incidence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-pbe, nep-reg and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Working Paper: Who Bears the Economic Costs of Environmental Regulations? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6596

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