The proposals for a European tax on CO₂ and their implications for intercountry distribution

This paper analyzes the advantages and implications of the implementation of a European tax on carbon dioxide emissions as an own resource of the EU and it focuses on its effects on intercountry distribution. In contrast to a harmonized tax, which would only have distributive effects within each member state, a tax collected at European scale would also have important distributive effects among different countries. These effects would also depend on the use of tax revenues. The paper investigates through a simple empirical analysis the distributive effects among the member states of three tax models: a pure CO 2 model; a 50%/50% energy-CO2 model and a CO2 model with a burden on nuclear power.