Green fiscal reform and employment: A survey

Abstract

In the European debate an increase in employment is generally regarded as an important extra-dividend-in addition to improved environmental quality-from environmental taxes. The scope of this paper is to evaluate, going through the existing empirical literature, if-and to what degree-this result could be achieved through a green fiscal reform. A further goal of this paper is to assess which taxes are more efficient in terms of employment-creation when they are utilized for recycling back to the economy the revenue flowing from environmental taxes. This kind of exercise is largely different from the theoretical analysis of the double dividend issue. A large quantity of literature has grown during the recent years according to this approach, but this version of the double dividend theory will be disregarded in this paper.