Implications of Environmental Tax Reforms: Revisited

New Green Tax Reforms: Ex-Ante Assessments for Spain

“…At any rate, the general consensus accepts the presence of a second "weak" dividend, defined as the efficiency gain derived from allocating the revenue obtained with environmental taxation to allow for the reduction of other more distorting taxes (when compared to other alternatives). Subsequent to the theoretical advances, a rich empirical literature emerged as theoretical literature on the double dividend of environmental taxation developed, focusing on the impacts of green tax reforms generally through ex-ante simulations ( [31][32][33][34][35][36] provide summaries of the methodologies and results). This literature generally points out that green tax reforms allow significant reductions in pollution at a limited economic cost [34,37] because recycling tax revenue helps mitigate the negative macroeconomic effects of environmental taxation [36].…”

“…In this context, some countries began to implement this tax reform model in practice. In general, the literature (see [33][34][35]38,39]) distinguishes between two generations of green tax reforms that follow the foundations of the double dividend theory: the use of environmental tax revenue to reduce other conventionally distorting taxes within a context of full revenue substitution. The first generation began in the early 90s of the last century in Scandinavia.…”

A Panorama on Energy Taxes amd Green Tax Reforms

“…Ex-post empirical analysis on real energy tax experiences are less common, due to limited tax applications or to lacking data, but have been occasionally carried out. Bosquet (2000), Barker et al (2011), Speck andGee (2011) or Ekins and Speck (2011) are useful overviews of the empirical methodologies and results from this rich literature. These issues have been also considered in several Spanish surveys and policy papers (see e.g.…”

“…Several overviews of such experiences have been published, some of them quite recently (e.g. Speck and Gee, 2011;Gago and Labandeira, 2011;Bakker, 2009), which basically report two generations of green tax reforms (GTR) that would differ in both the guiding energy tax schemes and revenue-recycling procedures. We next describe the most representative applications within those generations.…”