Ignasi Puig Ventosa, Rosaria Chifari, Luís Campos Rodrigues and Sergio Sastre Sanz are the members of ENT who have contributed to the study “Green taxation and other economic instruments – Internalizing environmental costs to make the polluter pay”. This study presents economic instruments used in the EU Member States to make polluters pay. It was developed in a project led by Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) for DG Environment of the European Commission.
This study provides calculations of the external costs associated with air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, waste treatment, water scarcity and biodiversity loss in the EU, and of the extent to which these costs are internalised in taxation and other economic instruments in the EU. The results indicate that to a very large extent, EU polluters are not currently being made to pay. A range of potential environmental taxes and other economic instruments are assessed, and results presented of new macroeconomic modelling that indicates wider use of such measures, with revenues used to lower labour taxation, can produce positive impacts for EU GDP, employment and real household incomes.