The Distributional Effects Of Climate Policies

Policymakers will not accept forceful decarbonisation policies if they lead to visibly increasing inequality within their societies. The distributive effects of climate policies need to be addressed. This report provides a selective review of recent academic literature and experience on the distributional effects of climate policies.

This book builds upon existing literature to simultaneously examine disparities in the distribution of environmental impacts of environmental policy and in the distribution of financial effects among households.

Governments around the globe have begun to implement various actions to limit carbon emissions and so, combat climate change. This book brings together some of the leading scholars in environmental and climate economics to examine the distributional consequences of policies that are designed to reduce these carbon emissions. Whether through a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system or other mechanisms, most proposals to reduce carbon emissions include some kind of carbon pricing system Ð shifting the costs of emissions onto polluters and providing an incentive to find the least costly methods of abatement. This standard efficiency justification for pricing carbon also has important distributional consequences Ð a problem that is often ignored by economists while being a major focus of attention in the political arena. Leading scholars in environmental and climate economics take up these issues to examine such questions as: Will the costs fall on current or future generations? Will they fall on the rich, poor, middle class, or on everyone proportionally? Which countries will benefit, and which will suffer? Students and scholars interested in climate change, along with policy makers, will find this lively volume an invaluable addition to the quest for information on this globally important issue.

Many effects of environmental and energy policy are likely to disproportionately burden those with low income. First, it raises the price of fossil-fuel-intensive products that constitute a high fraction of low-income budgets (like gasoline, heating fuel and electricity). Second, the handout of pollution permits to firms provides value to those who own them. Third, low-income individuals may place more value on food and shelter than on improvements in environmental quality, so high-income individuals may get the most benefit of pollution abatement. Fourth, air quality improvements may raise the value of houses owned by landlords, rather than helping renters. These effects might all hurt the poor more than the rich. This book brings together the seminal economics literature that studies whether these fears are valid and whether anything can be done about them.

Fuel Taxes and the Poor challenges the conventional wisdom that gasoline taxation, an important and much-debated instrument of climate policy, has a disproportionately detrimental effect on poor people. Increased fuel taxes carry the potential to mitigate carbon emissions, reduce congestion, and improve local urban environment. As such, higher gasoline taxes could prove to be a fundamental part of any climate action plan. However, they have been resisted by powerful lobbies that have persuaded people that increased fuel taxation would be regressive. Reporting on examples of over two dozen countries, this book sets out to empirically investigate this claim. The authors conclude that while there may be some slight regressivity in some high-income countries, as a general rule, fuel taxation is a progressive policy particularly in low income countries. Rich countries can correct for regressivity by cutting back on other taxes that adversely affect poor people, or by spending more money on services for the poor. Meanwhile, in low-income countries, poor people spend a very small share of their money on fuel for transport. Some costs from fuel taxes may be passed on to poor people through more expensive public transportation and food transport. Nevertheless, in general the authors find that gasoline taxes become more progressive as the income of the country in question decreases. This book provides strong arguments for the proponents of environmental taxation. It has immediate policy implications at the intersection of multiple subject areas, including transportation, environmental regulation, development studies, and climate change. Published with Environment for Development initiative.

Addressing the poverty and distributional impacts of carbon pricing reforms is critical for the success of ambitious actions in the fight against climate change. This paper uses a simple framework to systematically review the channels through which carbon pricing can potentially affect poverty and inequality. It finds that the channels differ in important ways along several dimensions. The paper also identifies several key gaps in the current literature and discusses some considerations on how policy designs could take into account the attributes of the channels in mitigating the impacts of carbon pricing reforms on households.

"This book contains the proceedings of an NBER conference held in Washington, DC, on May 13-14, 2010"--Page xi.

The specific focus of this seminal work is on the economic impact of climate change on agriculture world wide, and how faced with the resultant environmental alterations, agriculture might adapt under varied and varying conditions. Enhanced with a detailed and comprehensive index, Climate Change and Agriculture is highly recommended for academic library environmental studies and economic studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists. The Midwest Book Review Despite its great importance, there are surprisingly few economic studies of the impact of climate on agriculture and how agriculture can adapt under a variety of conditions. This book examines 22 countries across four continents, including both developed and developing economies. It provides both a good analytical basis for additional work and solid results for policy debate concerning income distributional effects such as abatement, adaptation, and equity. Agriculture and grazing are a central sector in the livelihood of many people, particularly in developing countries. This book uses the Ricardian method to examine the impact of climate change on agriculture. It also quantifies how farmers adapt to climate. The findings suggest that agriculture in developing countries is more sensitive to climate than agriculture in developed countries. Rain-fed cropland is generally more sensitive to warming than irrigated cropland and cropland is more sensitive than livestock. The adaptation to climate change results reveal that farmers make many adjustments including switching crops and livestock species, adopting irrigation, and moving between livestock and crops. The results also reveal that impacts and adaptations vary a great deal across landscapes, suggesting that adaptation policies must be location specific. Finally, the book suggests a research agenda for the future. Economists in academia and the public sector, policy analysts and development agencies will find this broad study illuminating.