How do governments actually use environmental taxes?

This paper empirically examines how governments actually use environmental taxes, by looking to what extent their resort to this type of taxation is consistent with three alternative interpretations of environmental taxes proposed by the welfare economics theoretical literature: the strict and the broad Pigouvian and the double dividend hypotheses. We also extend our analysis to an alternative vision of politics, the Leviathan model, to verify how governments that are imperfectly accountable use environmental taxes. Each theory leads to alternative testable hypotheses, which we verify on a sample that minimizes the analysts’ discretionary evaluations, the EU-28 countries that committed themselves to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The estimates lend support to the strict Pigouvian hypothesis and, to a lesser extent, to a version of the double dividend hypothesis, where personal income taxes are ‘recycled’ by environmental ones. The other interpretations do not appear consistent with the data.