Carrot and stick incentive policies for climate change mitigation: A survey experiment on crowding out of public support

Maoliang Ling, Chutian Liu, Lin Xu and Haimi Yang

Ecological Economics, 2024, vol. 223, issue C

Abstract: To motivate public participation in climate change mitigation, both “carrot” policies that create positive incentives for mitigated carbon and “stick” policies that create negative incentives for emitted carbon have been widely applied. Given the joint deployment of these measures, a key question is whether they are compatible with each other. Focusing on the Low-Carbon Reward Scheme (LCRS) and carbon taxes, two prominent proposals on China's climate policy agenda, this study evaluates how one incentive policy affects public support for the other. The results of a large survey experiment with Hangzhou residents indicate a two-way crowding-out effect, wherein introducing the LCRS diminished support for the tax, albeit primarily among LCRS proponents, and introducing the tax reduced support for the LCRS. Aligning with the proposed account, crowding out was driven by a decrease in policy effectiveness and fairness perceptions. These findings reveal a contradictory relationship between carrot and stick policies at the citizen level and illuminate the underlying mechanism.

Keywords: Climate change mitigation; Rewards; Taxation; Public support; Crowding out (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924001393
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:ecolec:v:223:y:2024:i:c:s0921800924001393

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108242

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().