The Proposals for a European Tax on CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> and Their Implications for Intercountry Distribution

This paper analyzes the advantages andimplications of the implementation of aEuropean tax on carbon dioxide emissions as anown resource of the EU and it focuses on itseffects on intercountry distribution. Incontrast to a harmonized tax, which would onlyhave distributive effects within each memberstate, a tax collected at European scale wouldalso have important distributive effects amongdifferent countries. These effects would alsodepend on the use of tax revenues. The paperinvestigates through a simple empiricalanalysis the distributive effects among themember states of three tax models: a pureCO<Subscript>2</Subscript> model; a 50%/50% energy-CO<Subscript>2</Subscript>model and a CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> model with a burden onnuclear power. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004