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Instruments for Sustainability: Strategic Planning and Ecological Tax Reform

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Abstract

The implementation of a sustainable economy requires carrying out an in-depth transformation of the economic system in force. Many governments have been developing National Sustainable Development Strategies (NSDS), and for this reason it is pertinent to evaluate their capacity for transformation. An essential requirement of the evaluation is to analyse whether they carry out an ecological tax reform (ETR), because the current tax system subsidises the destruction of the planet. But many proposals and applications of tax reforms have a scarce potential for transformation. For this reason leading authors propose a more radical ETR. They defend the goal of transforming the economic system in order to bring it closer to sustainability. This transformation means that the most unsustainable activities are drastically reduced or even eliminated, and that on the other hand others that are now weaker or non-existent are intensely developed. The ETR uses two instruments: it eliminates the subsidies that are perverse for sustainability and establishes escalating taxes, that is, they are increased annually until the goals pursued are achieved.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics & Business Studies, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain

    Roberto Bermejo

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  1. Roberto Bermejo
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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Bermejo, R. (2014). Instruments for Sustainability: Strategic Planning and Ecological Tax Reform. In: Handbook for a Sustainable Economy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8981-3_8

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