Future Pain at the Diesel Pump? Potential Eff ects of the European Commission’s Energy Taxation Proposal
Abstract
The Energy Tax Directive recently proposed by the European Commission envisages to tax fuels based on their energy content. By raising prices for diesel to a level higher than that of petrol, this proposal would eliminate the price advantage currently enjoyed by diesel in most EU Member States. To explore the implications of such a tax regime for automobile travel, the present analysis undertakes a comparative analysis of price elasticities for both fuel types. Drawing on household panel data from Germany, we fail to reject the hypothesis that the fuel price elasticities for petrol and diesel are equal. With our uniform fuel price elasticity estimates being on the order of -0.5 to -0.42, the typical fi nding from the empirical literature that the elasticities gleaned from household-level data are generally larger than those from aggregate time-series data is reconfirmed.Download Info
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Paper provided by Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Dortmund, Universität Duisburg-Essen in its series Ruhr Economic Papers with number 0280.Length: 25 pages
Date of creation: Sep 2011
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Handle: RePEc:rwi:repape:0280
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Related research
Keywords: Fuel taxation; fuel price elasticities; household data; automobile travel; panel;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- L98 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Government Policy
- Y10 - Miscellaneous Categories - - Data: Tables and Charts - - - Data: Tables and Charts
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2011-10-09 (All new papers)
- NEP-ENE-2011-10-09 (Energy Economics)
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Sterner, Thomas, 2007. "Fuel taxes: An important instrument for climate policy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 3194-3202, June.
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Ruhr Economic Papers
0032, Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Dortmund, Universität Duisburg-Essen.
- Manuel Frondel & Jorg Peters & Colin Vance, 2008. "Identifying the Rebound: Evidence from a German Household Panel," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 4), pages 145-164.
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"Fixed, Random, or Something in Between? – A Variant of HAUSMAN’s Specifi cation Test for Panel Data Estimators,"
Ruhr Economic Papers
0160, Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Dortmund, Universität Duisburg-Essen.
- Frondel, Manuel & Vance, Colin, 2010. "Fixed, random, or something in between? A variant of Hausman's specification test for panel data estimators," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 107(3), pages 327-329, June.
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