Tracking global carbon revenues: A survey of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade in the real world

By J. Carl, D. Fedor. 2016

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We investigate the current use of public revenues which are generated through both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. More than $28.3 billion in government “carbon revenues” are currently collected each year in 40 countries and another 16 states or provinces around the world. Of those revenues, 27% ($7.8 billion) are used to subsidize “green” spending in energy efficiency or renewable energy; 26% ($7.4 billion) go toward state general funds; and 36% ($10.1 billion) are returned to corporate or individual taxpayers through paired tax cuts or direct rebates. Cap-and-trade systems ($6.57 billion in total public revenue) earmark a larger share of revenues for “green” spending (70%), while carbon tax systems ($21.7 billion) more commonly refund revenues or otherwise direct them towards government general funds (72% of revenues). Drawing from an empirical dataset, we also identify various trends in systems’ use of “carbon revenues” in terms of the total revenues collected annually per capita in each jurisdiction and offer commensurate qualitative observations on carbon policy design choices.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ef2025471d48a16d69e2f00d2211bf9263a03da

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Carbon pricing in practice: a review of existing emissions trading systems (2018, background): “As of 2014, about 70% of cap-and-trade revenues around the world earmarked revenues towards environmental purposes (Carl & Fedor, 2016).”
Perceived fairness and public acceptability of carbon pricing: a review of the literature (2019, background): “In fact, an analysis of the various countries that had implemented carbon pricing schemes by 2013 revealed that almost none of them combine these two revenue uses (Carl and Fedor, 2016).”
Carbon tax or cap-and-trade: Which is more viable for Chinese remanufacturing industry? (2020, background): “Carl and Fedor (2016) investigated the generation of public revenues through cap-and-trade and carbon tax. For the power industry, C. Y. Liu (2017) advocated cap-and-trade due to the fact that carbon-intensive (dirty) energy is heavily subsidized worldwide, making carbon tax relatively ineffective. ”
Exploring Carbon Pricing in Developing Countries: A Macroeconomic Analysis in Ethiopia (2019, background): “For example, Winkler (2017) shows how carbon tax revenues can be used to promote sustainable energy production in South Africa; of the tens of billions of dollars in carbon tax revenues already being raised, more than a quarter is going to green spending (Carl and Fedor, 2016).”
Renewable energy policies in a time of transition (2018, background): “In 2016, 15% of global revenues from carbon taxation supported such spending, including for heating and cooling (Carl and Fedor, 2016).”
Carbon taxes and greenhouse gas emissions trading systems: what have we learned? (2018, background): “…of the following purposes: financing mitigation and adaptation measures, addressing inequitable impacts of the instrument on low income groups, providing rebates to energy-intensive, tradeexposed (EITE) firms, reducing existing taxes and general revenues (Carl & Fedor, 2016; Métivier et al., 2018).”
The effect of carbon pricing on technological change for full energy decarbonization: A review of empirical ex‐post evidence (2020, background): “Across ETSs, governments have allocated 70% of revenues toward green spending, while in the case of taxes, they allocate 72% of revenues toward refunding private revenues and government's general budgets (Carl & Fedor, 2016).”