Footnote:
In: Final version published in Transportation Research A: Policy and Practice (2015) Vol. 73, pp. 31-38
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments March 30, 2013 erstellt
Description:
Despite the current interest in using fuel taxes as an instrument for climate policy there has been little study of current automotive fuel tax regimes. We expand on two earlier cross-sectional studies on why fuel taxes differ across countries by using OECD panel data and employing panel cointegration and long-run panel Granger-causality techniques. We confirm those earlier studies’ conclusion that governments view gasoline taxes as simply another revenue source. Further, we find that governments that rely more on consumption-based taxes for revenues will have higher gasoline tax rates (than governments that rely on income and wealth/property-based taxes). But more significantly, we determine that higher gasoline demand among consumers “causes” democratic governments to set lower gasoline taxes — a finding with important implications for today’s climate/energy policy debate