This paper investigates the environmental effectiveness of the energy taxes. That is, whether these have decreased the CO2 emissions and how they have changed the structure of the energy consumption. Time series data for the years 1960-2002 is used. The results show that the oil and coal taxes seem to favour a substitution towards less CO2 intensive energy sources. For the natural gas tax however, the opposite is true. An energy saving effect is found for the oil tax and the petrol tax, but the electricity tax seems to increase energy consumption. Regarding the total effect on CO2 emissions, the oil and coal taxes seem to decrease CO2 emissions while the natural gas tax seems to increase them.Cross-country regressions are also made to examine if countries with a higher petrol tax have lower a lower rate of CO2 emissions on average. The results show that a higher petrol tax is significantly correlated to lower CO2 emissions.The results thus indicate that energy taxes do decrease CO2 emissions. They also show that caution should be used before implementing a natural gas tax since it can have adverse effects on the CO2 emissions.
Contents
1. Introduction
2. Theory
2.1 Market failures
2.2 Pigouvian tax
2.3 The double dividend hypothesis
2.4 The carbon tax
3. Energy taxes in Sweden
3.1 Energy taxes
3.2 The energy demand in the industry sector
3.3 The energy demand for the households
4. Method
4.1 The econometric model
4.2 Data
4.3 Data description
5. Results
5.1 The importance of energy taxes in reducing CO2 emissions per energy unit
5.2 The importance of energy taxes in reducing energy consumption
5.3 The importance of energy taxes in reducing CO2 emissions
5.4 A cross country study of the petrol tax in the OECD countries
6. Analysis and conclusions
6.1 The importance of energy taxes in reducing CO2 emissions per energy unit
6.2 The importance of energy taxes in reducing energy consumption
6.3 The importance of energy taxes in reducing CO2 emissions
6.4 The environmental effectiveness of the petrol tax in the OECD countries
6.5 Conclusions
References
Books and publications
Data and statistics
Author: Sundqvist, Patrik
Source: Uppsala University Library
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