One element of the proposed European Green Deal is a border carbon adjustment mechanism. The introduction of a BCA would allow the EU to phase out current carbon leakage provisions of the ETS and to auction off all emission allowances, thus rendering the ETS a more effective unilateral tool to...

The need to reform EU funding and recent political developments such as Brexit and the withdrawal from the USA from the 2015 Paris climate agreement could revitalise the debate about the introduction of border carbon adjustments (BCA) for the European emission trading system (ETS). The...

Economic literature generally favours market-based instruments for regulating environmental externalities since they ensure compliance at the least cost to society. Emission taxes have been increasingly introduced internationally, with the focus shifting to CO2 after the adoption of the Kyoto...

While environmental taxes aim at making environmentally harmful behaviour more costly, the opposite is true for environmentally beneficial tax incentives. Tax incentives imply foregone public revenues to favour less polluting consumption and investment activities in order to achieve...

In view of the challenges posed by climate change and the increase in climate targets by 2030 in the EU, as well as Austria's goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2040, the question of effective climate policy instruments is gaining in importance. The pricing of CO2, for instance in the form...

We assess distributive, macroeconomic, and CO2 emission impacts of CO2 tax schemes in Austria by applying the macroeconomic Input-Output model DYNK[AUT]. The tax schemes analysed focus primarily on CO2 emissions not covered by the European Emission Trading System (ETS), applying different CO2...

The excitement about concluding the Paris Agreement is giving way to the sobering realisation that a lot more needs to be done to attain its climate policy objective. More and more EU member countries embrace carbon taxes but the national measures differ strongly. In an integrated European...

This paper examines the implementation issues and barriers for introducing a carbon tax at EU member state level. Important success determinants are related to the political economy of introducing taxes (negotiations with stakeholders, concessions, changes in proposed legislation, compromises,...

The aim of this paper is to map legal aspects that should be taken into account in designing a carbon tax. The survey of the legal literature concludes that many different aspects have to be taken into account in designing a carbon tax, both with respect to the kind of legal instruments to be...

As governments spend unprecedented sums of public money on pandemic related rescue and recovery measures, while humankind is facing mounting long-term challenges - and above all the climate crisis -, the question whether and to what extent COVID-19 recovery programmes contribute to countries'...