Greenhouse effect, international trade and local taxation of oil products[Effet de serre, échanges internationaux et taxation locale des produits pétroliers]

This article deals with the impacts of national environmental taxes on economic efficiency when pollution is global. We propose a dynamic, two-country model where the use of a non-renewable resource generates emissions accumulating in a world stock of atmospheric pollution. We assume that the two countries differ along their total productivity, their size and their endowments with the resource, which is entirely owned by one country. We show that the use of national taxes may correct the global pollution externality if governments coordinate on the temporal profile of taxes. Nevertheless, each government is tempted to strategically use the level of its tax. Countries' heterogeneities then entail different taxes, and therefore different final prices, thus creating a new distortion in the allocation of the resource. This analysis suggests an argument against the use of environmental taxes in the fight against greenhouse effect, at the benefit of other instruments. The argument mainly relies on the diverging interests of countries in levying tax revenues on the use of non-renewable resources.