The Political Economy of Green Transition: Evidence from EU Allocation to French Municipalities

Jules Ducept, Antoine Ebeling and Samuel Ligonnière ()
Additional contact information
Jules Ducept: EU Tax - EU Tax Observatory, CEPS - Centre d'Economie de l'ENS Paris-Saclay - Université Paris-Saclay - ENS Paris Saclay - Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay
Antoine Ebeling: BETA - Bureau d'Économie Théorique et Appliquée - AgroParisTech - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) Mulhouse - Colmar - UL - Université de Lorraine - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: How will electoral competition drive the green transition? This paper examines the factors influencing the allocation of EU green funds to French municipalities using a novel dataset covering 980 municipalities across two multi-annual financial frameworks (2007-2013 and 2014-2020). We identify green projects based on the official taxonomy and explore both the economic and political determinants of these green and other projects. While political economy models highlight the role of political alignment between the mayor and higher levels of government, as well as the significance of municipalities with narrow electoral margins, we find distinct determinants for green projects. Political alignment significantly influences the demand for brown projects, but not for green projects. However, a narrow electoral margin increases the demand for both types of projects, especially green ones. We instrument this effect using the number of appeals filed by municipal opposition in French public courts. Our findings show how green voters and political contestability accelerate the green transition.

Keywords: Political Economy; European Cohesion Policy; Municipalities; Environmental Subsidies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12-24
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04854961v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04854961v1/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-04854961

Access Statistics for this paper

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