IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fae/ppaper/2017.08.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Compensating households from carbon tax regressivity and fuel poverty: a microsimulation study

Author

Listed:
  • Audrey Berry

    (CIRED)

Abstract

For households, taxing carbon raises the cost of the energy they use to heat their home and to travel. This paper studies the distributional impacts of the recently introduced French carbon tax and the design of compensation measures. Using a microsimulation model built on a representative sample of the French population from 2012, I simulate for each household the taxes levied on its consumption of energy for housing and transport. Without recycling, the carbon tax is regressive and increases fuel poverty. However, I show how compensation measures can offset these impacts. A flat cash transfer offsets tax regressivity by redistributing

Suggested Citation

  • Audrey Berry, 2017. "Compensating households from carbon tax regressivity and fuel poverty: a microsimulation study," Policy Papers 2017.08, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    • Handle: RePEc:fae:ppaper:2017.08
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://faere.fr/pub/PolicyPapers/Berry_FAERE_PP2017_08.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2017
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James M. Poterba, 1991. "Is the Gasoline Tax Regressive?," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 5, pages 145-164, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. François Bourguignon & Amedeo Spadaro, 2006. "Microsimulation as a tool for evaluating redistribution policies," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 4(1), pages 77-106, April.
    3. Sterner, Thomas, 2007. "Fuel taxes: An important instrument for climate policy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 3194-3202, June.
    4. Fullerton, Don & Metcalf, Gilbert E., 2002. "Tax incidence," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 26, pages 1787-1872, Elsevier.
    5. Bureau, Benjamin, 2011. "Distributional effects of a carbon tax on car fuels in France," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 121-130, January.
    6. Emmanuel Combet & Frédéric Ghersi & Jean Charles Hourcade, 2009. "Taxe carbone, une mesure socialement régressive ? Vrais problèmes et faux débats," Working Papers hal-00866409, HAL.
    7. Julie Anne Cronin & Don Fullerton & Steven Sexton, 2019. "Vertical and Horizontal Redistributions from a Carbon Tax and Rebate," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 6(S1), pages 169-208.
    8. Spadaro Amedeo (ed.), 2007. "Microsimulation as Tool for the Evaluation of Public Policies: Methods and Applications," Books, Fundacion BBVA / BBVA Foundation, number 201169, December.
    9. Legendre, Bérangère & Ricci, Olivia, 2015. "Measuring fuel poverty in France: Which households are the most fuel vulnerable?," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 620-628.
    10. Clinch, J. Peter & Healy, John D., 2001. "Cost-benefit analysis of domestic energy efficiency," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 29(2), pages 113-124, January.
    11. Merz, Joachim, 1991. "Microsimulation -- A survey of principles, developments and applications," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 77-104, May.
    12. Rausch, Sebastian & Schwarz, Giacomo A., 2016. "Household heterogeneity, aggregation, and the distributional impacts of environmental taxes," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 43-57.
    13. Véronique Nichèle & J.M. Robin, 1995. "Simulation of indirect tax reforms using pooled micro and macro French data [Evaluation des effets budgétaires et redistributifs de réformes de la fiscalité indirecte française]," Post-Print hal-02699381, HAL.
    14. Callan, Tim & Lyons, Sean & Scott, Susan & Tol, Richard S.J. & Verde, Stefano, 2009. "The distributional implications of a carbon tax in Ireland," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 407-412, February.
    15. Nichele, Veronique & Robin, Jean-Marc, 1995. "Simulation of indirect tax reforms using pooled micro and macro French data," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 225-244, February.
    16. Emmanuel Combet & Frédéric Ghersi & Jean Charles Hourcade, 2009. "Taxe carbone, une mesure socialement régressive ? Vrais problèmes et faux débats," CIRED Working Papers hal-00866409, HAL.
    17. Dorothée Charlier & Anna Risch & Claire Salmon, 2015. "Les indicateurs de la précarité énergétique en France," Revue française d'économie, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(4), pages 187-230.
    18. John Hills, 2012. "Final report of the Hills Independent Fuel Poverty Review: Getting the Measure of Fuel Poverty," CASE Reports casereport72, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    19. Audrey Berry & Yves Jouffe & Nicolas Coulombel & Céline Guivarch, 2016. "Investigating fuel poverty in the transport sector: toward a composite indicator of vulnerability," Post-Print hal-01277414, HAL.
    20. Thomson, Harriet & Snell, Carolyn, 2013. "Quantifying the prevalence of fuel poverty across the European Union," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 563-572.
    21. Bouzarovski, Stefan & Petrova, Saska & Sarlamanov, Robert, 2012. "Energy poverty policies in the EU: A critical perspective," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 76-82.
    22. Véronique Nichèle & Jean-Marc Robin, 1995. "Simulation of indirect tax reforms using pooled micro and macro French data," Post-Print hal-03587618, HAL.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Antosiewicz, Marek & Fuentes, J. Rodrigo & Lewandowski, Piotr & Witajewski-Baltvilks, Jan, 2022. "Distributional effects of emission pricing in a carbon-intensive economy: The case of Poland," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    2. Thomas Douenne, 2018. "The vertical and horizontal distributive effects of energy taxes," Policy Papers 2018.05, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    3. Laure Baratgin & Emmanuel Combet, 2022. "Quelques pistes pour concilier des objectifs sociaux, économiques et écologiques," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(1), pages 121-146.
    4. García-Muros, Xaquín & Morris, Jennifer & Paltsev, Sergey, 2022. "Toward a just energy transition: A distributional analysis of low-carbon policies in the USA," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    5. Alberto Gago & Xavier Labandeira & José M. Labeaga & Xiral López Otero, 2021. "Transport Taxes and Decarbonization in Spain: Distributional Impacts and Compensation," Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, IEF, vol. 238(3), pages 101-136, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Audrey Berry, 2018. "Compensating households from carbon tax regressivity and fuel poverty: a microsimulation study," Working Papers hal-01691088, HAL.
    2. Berry, Audrey, 2019. "The distributional effects of a carbon tax and its impact on fuel poverty: A microsimulation study in the French context," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 81-94.
    3. Thomas Douenne, 2018. "The vertical and horizontal distributive effects of energy taxes," Policy Papers 2018.05, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    4. Heindl, Peter & Löschel, Andreas, 2015. "Social implications of green growth policies from the perspective of energy sector reform and its impact on households," ZEW Discussion Papers 15-012, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    5. Kahouli, Sondès & Okushima, Shinichiro, 2021. "Regional energy poverty reevaluated: A direct measurement approach applied to France and Japan," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    6. Llorca, Manuel & Rodriguez-Alvarez, Ana & Jamasb, Tooraj, 2020. "Objective vs. subjective fuel poverty and self-assessed health," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(C).
    7. Dorothee Charlier and Berangere Legendre, 2019. "A Multidimensional Approach to Measuring Fuel Poverty," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 2).
    8. Dorothée Charlier & Bérangère Legendre, 2016. "Fuel Poverty: A Composite Index Approach," Policy Papers 2016.06, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    9. Feindt, Simon & Kornek, Ulrike & Labeaga, José M. & Sterner, Thomas & Ward, Hauke, 2021. "Understanding regressivity: Challenges and opportunities of European carbon pricing," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    10. Romero, José Carlos & Linares, Pedro & López, Xiral, 2018. "The policy implications of energy poverty indicators," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 98-108.
    11. Leif Jacobs & Lara Quack & Mario Mechtel, 2021. "Distributional Effects of Carbon Pricing by Transport Fuel Taxation," Working Paper Series in Economics 405, University of Lüneburg, Institute of Economics.
    12. Rodriguez-Alvarez, Ana & Llorca, Manuel & Jamasb, Tooraj, 2021. "Alleviating energy poverty in Europe: Front-runners and laggards," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    13. Brannlund, Runar & Nordstrom, Jonas, 2004. "Carbon tax simulations using a household demand model," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 211-233, February.
    14. Caitlin Robinson & Stefan Bouzarovski & Sarah Lindley, 2018. "Underrepresenting neighbourhood vulnerabilities? The measurement of fuel poverty in England," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 50(5), pages 1109-1127, August.
    15. Delgado, Miguel A & Miles, Daniel, 1997. "Household Characteristics and Consumption Behaviour: A Nonparametric Approach," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 22(3), pages 409-429.
    16. Charlier, Dorothée & Legendre, Bérangère, 2021. "Fuel poverty in industrialized countries: Definition, measures and policy implications a review," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 236(C).
    17. Crawford, Ian & Laisney, Francois & Preston, Ian, 2003. "Estimation of household demand systems with theoretically compatible Engel curves and unit value specifications," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 114(2), pages 221-241, June.
    18. Kurt Kratena & Ina Meyer & Michael Wüger, 2009. "Ökonomische, technologische und soziodemographische Einflussfaktoren der Energienachfrage," WIFO Monatsberichte (monthly reports), WIFO, vol. 82(7), pages 525-538, July.
    19. Aubert, Diane & Chiroleu-Assouline, Mireille, 2019. "Environmental tax reform and income distribution with imperfect heterogeneous labour markets," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 60-82.
    20. Rausch, Sebastian & Schwarz, Giacomo A., 2016. "Household heterogeneity, aggregation, and the distributional impacts of environmental taxes," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 43-57.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Carbon tax; Distributional impacts; Fuel poverty; Revenue recycling; Microsimulation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q5 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics
    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fae:ppaper:2017.08. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dorothée Charlier (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/faereea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.