Water Taxes and Consumer Behavior in France

Simon Porcher

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Water taxes are employed to correct externalities associated with water pollution or resource scarcity and to raise government revenue. In this paper, using a dataset on more than 4,000 French municipalities, we directly examine how water taxes affect consumer behavior as distinct from tax-exclusive water prices. Our analysis shows that a 10-cent tax increase reduces water consumption by 0.26 percent, similarly to a 10-cent increase in the tax-exclusive water price. The responsiveness of consumers to tax and tax-exclusive price is important because it gives information about consumers' sensitivity to policy interventions versus market prices.

Keywords: Externalities; Water Utilities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-pbe, nep-pub and nep-reg
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02145848
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02145848/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:wpaper:hal-02145848

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().