Welfare-Improving Carbon Dioxide Tax Reform Taking Externality and Location into Account

Abstract

Using Swedish household data from 1992, I analyze whether households disproportionately burdened by an increased carbon dioxide tax can be compensated by changes in other commodity taxes. This is done by searching for Dalton–improving tax reforms (DI-reforms), a method for welfare analysis which requires only ranking of households rather than cardinal comparisons. This application of the method has two features not found in earlier applications. First, the direct value of reduced carbon dioxide emissions is incorporated in the analysis. Second, the method is extended to allow identification of three-dimensional tax reforms, to be able to rank households along three dimensions. It is found that i) incorporating the value of reduced emissions does not unambiguously expand the set of DI-reforms, and ii) DI-reforms exist only when households are ranked in line with expenditures and size. When households' access to public transportation is also considered no DI-reforms are found.