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International Fuel Tax Assessment: An Application to Chile

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  • Parry, Ian

    (Resources for the Future)

  • Strand, Jon

Abstract

Most developed and developing country governments levy taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel used by motor vehicles. However, outside of the United States and Europe, automobile and heavy truck externalities have not been quantified, so policymakers have little guidance on whether prevailing tax rates are anywhere close to their corrective levels. This paper develops a general approach for roughly gauging the magnitude of motor vehicle externalities, and hence the corrective tax on gasoline and diesel, for individual countries, based on pooling local data sources with extrapolations from U.S. data. The analysis is illustrated for the case of Chile, though it could be readily applied to other countries with appropriate data collection.

Suggested Citation

  • Parry, Ian & Strand, Jon, 2010. "International Fuel Tax Assessment: An Application to Chile," RFF Working Paper Series dp-10-07, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-10-07
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    File URL: http://www.rff.org/RFF/documents/RFF-DP-10-07.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Keywords

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    JEL classification:

    • Q48 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Government Policy
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy
    • R48 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - Government Pricing and Policy
    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation

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