Carbon Tax in Taiwan: Path Dependence and the High-Carbon Regime

Kuei-Tien Chou and Hwa-Meei Liou ()
Additional contact information
Kuei-Tien Chou: Risk Society and Policy Research Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106319, Taiwan
Hwa-Meei Liou: Graduate Institute of Technology Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106335, Taiwan

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: As it has an export-oriented economy, Taiwan urgently needs to keep up with the growing trends toward carbon taxation. However, making the institution of a carbon tax a reality in Taiwan has proven to be difficult. Since 1998, Taiwan has explored the possibility of putting a tax on carbon many times. Specifically, three main windows of opportunity emerged to adopt a carbon tax during this period; however, all of them failed. This study mainly explores why these three opportunities failed, what structural factors hindered them, and how those structural factors formed path dependence and locked the entire society back onto the existing development track. Firstly, Taiwan’s high-carbon industrial structure has established the rapid growth of energy-intensive industries since the end of the 1990s and has created an economy with high energy consumption and pollution levels. Secondly, this analysis showed that through the combination of government bureaucracy, industry, and the China National Federation of Industries, this brown economy and high-carbon emission structure generated institutional, cognitive, and techno-institutional complex lock-ins, which have led Taiwan to its current path and hindered its transformation. Thirdly, under the above framework, this study further analyzes the contexts and problems that caused the three windows of opportunity to fail. Finally, by linking the economy-first orientation of developmental states, this study identifies structural difficulties and possible breakthrough conditions for newly industrialized/industrializing countries that are undergoing low-carbon transitions.

Keywords: carbon tax; path dependence; high-carbon regime; techno-institutional complex; carbon lock-in effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/1/513/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/1/513/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:1:p:513-:d:1023063

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().