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Does green taxation drive countries towards the carbon efficiency frontier?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2017

Tobias Böhmelt ,
Farzad Vaziri  and
Hugh Ward
Tobias Böhmelt
Affiliation:
Center for Comparative and International Studies, ETH Zürich, Switzerland Department of Government, University of Essex, UK E-mail: tobias.boehmelt@ir.gess.ethz.ch or tbohmelt@essex.ac.uk
Farzad Vaziri
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Essex, UK E-mail: fvazir@essex.ac.uk
Hugh Ward
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Essex, UK E-mail: hugh@essex.ac.uk
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Abstract

A country is on the carbon efficiency frontier if its per-capita emissions of CO2 are at least as low as any state that was at least as economically developed at a period when technology was no more advanced. Building on earlier work employing Data Envelopment Analysis to benchmark performance, we argue that a useful measure of whether a state adopts “good practice” in relation to climate change is how near it is to this frontier. We calculate efficiency scores for a sample of developed countries between 1994 and 2011, and model the impact of green taxation, next to a series of political and economic controls, on performance. We find that higher levels of environmental tax revenue are positively and significantly associated with higher carbon efficiency. The central contributions of this research are the introduction of an innovative measure for environmental quality and assessing how this is driven by green taxation.

Keywords

carbon efficiency frontierenvironmental efficiencyenvironmental outcome measuregreen taxationquantitative analysis
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 481 - 509
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2017 

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