While a carbon tax is widely acknowledged as an efficient policy to mitigate climate change, adoption has lagged. Part of the challenge resides in the distributional implications of a carbon tax and a belief that it tends to be regressive. Even when not regressive, poor households could be hurt...

The pan-Canadian approach to carbon pricing, announced in October 2016, ensures that carbon pricing applies throughout Canada in 2018, with increasing stringency over time to reduce emissions. Canadian provinces and territories have the flexibility to either implement an explicit price-based...

This paper discusses how the structure of the tax system affects its progressivity. It suggests a measure of progressive capacity of tax systems, based on the Kakwani index, but independent of pre-tax income distributions. Using this and other progressivity measures, the paper (i) documents a...

Rising fuel subsidies have contributed to fiscal pressures in India. A key policy concern regarding subsidy reform is the adverse welfare impact on households, in particular poor households. This paper evaluates the fiscal and welfare implications of fuel subsidy reform in India. Fuel subsidies...

Welfare economics, scope and performance of government, externalities, public goods, cost-benefit analysis, subsidies economize on spending without losing effectiveness by modifying the conceptual framework guiding state expenditures. The familiar framework says that state intervention is...

In short, yes. I use a multi-region integrated assessment model with fuel-specific endogenous technical change to examine the impact of Europe and China reducing emissions to zero by mid-century. Without international technological diffusion this is insufficient to avoid catastrophic climate...

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) announced in April 2018 a target of cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the sector by 50 percent below 2008 levels by 2050 and subsequent meetings of the IMO will develop a strategy for making headway on this commitment. This paper seeks to...

This paper recommends a system of upstream taxes on fossil fuels, combined with refunds for downstream emissions capture, to reduce carbon and local pollution emissions. Motor fuel taxes should also account for congestion and other externalities associated with vehicle use, at least until...

This paper investigates the mechanisms through which environmental taxes on fossil fuelusage can affect the main macroeconomic variables in the short-run. We concentrate on aparticular mechanism: speculative storage. The existence of forward-looking speculators inthe model improves the...

Carbon pricing is considered the most efficient policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but it has also been conjectured that other policies need to be implemented first to remove certain economic and political barriers to stringent climate policy. Here, we examine empirical evidence on the...