In recent years, CO2 emissions have become the leading basis of assessment for car taxes in most European countries. In July 2009, with a view to pursuing climate policy goals, also Germany began using this factor to assess taxation on cars. The DIW Berlin has carried out a systematic and...

The ecological tax reform that Germany implemented between 1999 and 2003 increased energy tax rates-especially on gasoline and diesel. Today, the ecological tax hikes yield an annual revenue of around 20 billion euros or 0.6 percent of GDP. The money is used to finance a higher federal grant to...

Duties and taxes on cars are an important source of revenue for European governments and the tax systems are also designed with the goal of achieving environmental policy objectives. A systematic and quantitative comparison of passenger car taxation in 30 European countries shows significant...

The Swiss CO2 law runs out in 2012, together with the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Currently, the Swiss parliament is deciding on the successor of the law that aims to achieve a 20% reduction of CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020. As a means to achieve this ambitious...

Economic theory suggests that with a pollution externality and learning spillovers related to renewable energy technologies, the optimal climate policy mix includes an emissions policy and an output subsidy to the learning industry. Instead of output subsidies, feed-in tariffs are often...

A unilateral tax on CO2 emissions may drive up indirect carbon imports from non-committed countries, leading to carbon leakage. Using a gravity model of carbon trade, we analyze the effect of the Kyoto Protocol on the carbon content of bilateral trade. We construct a novel data set of CO2...

We explore a global carbon pricing framework to inform the potential coordination of carbon pricing and equivalent policies. The framework has three main features aligning with the current multilateral system for climate action. First, the carbon price is determined by a global average carbon...