Supporting carbon taxes: The role of fairness

Linus Mattauch, Stephan Sommer and Michael Pahle

INET Oxford Working Papers from Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

Abstract: We conduct a discrete choice experiment with a sample of 6,000 German household heads to examine how fairness preferences influence the support for carbon taxes and revenue-recycling options. While it is well-known that carbon taxes are effective in reducing emissions and can be made progressive, they remain fairly unpopular with German citizens. Consequently, best practice to build public support for them remains a relevant question for which there is no consensus. We obtain two major results: First, while green spending is more popular in general, it is significantly more popular among those who are pro-environment and trust the government. Second, when restricted to options for direct revenue redistribution, Germans prefer lump-sum payments over directing payments to the poorest or the most affected. Importantly, choices over these options depend both on genuinely different conceptions of fairness and respondents' economic circumstances. Our findings have implications for building support for effective climate change mitigation policies with those who are not yet convinced.

Keywords: carbon pricing; climate change mitigation; fairness; redistribution; environmental tax reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 H23 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-isf and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/carbon.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Supporting carbon taxes: The role of fairness (2022)
Working Paper: Supporting carbon taxes: The role of fairness (2020)
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:amz:wpaper:2020-23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in INET Oxford Working Papers from Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by INET Oxford admin team ().