Ecological Tax Reform (ETR) is featuring high on the policy agenda. The key idea is to shift the tax burden from 'goods', such as productive labour, to 'bads' such as energy use and environmental pollution. Since the 1980s, most OECD countries have installed several environmental taxes and...

This paper examines the relative merits of two dominant economic instruments for reducing pollution—”green” taxes and tradable permits. Theoretically, the two instruments share many similarities, and on balance, neither seems preferable to the other. In practice, however, most countries...