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Georgia State University

Series

2017

Carbon taxes; Acceptability; Political economy; Ballot data; Choice experiment

Articles 1 - 1 of 1

Full-Text Articles in Public Administration

Green Taxes In A Post-Paris World: Are Millions Of Nays Inevitable?, Stefano Carattini, Andrea Barranzini, Philippe Thalmann, Frederic Varone, Frank Vohringer Mar 2017

Green Taxes In A Post-Paris World: Are Millions Of Nays Inevitable?, Stefano Carattini, Andrea Barranzini, Philippe Thalmann, Frederic Varone, Frank Vohringer

CSLF Articles

Turning the Paris Agreement’s greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value-added tax. We examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes, along with the perception of ineffectiveness. Most people would have preferred tax revenues to be …