Green Taxes in a Federal Context: An Empirical Model for Industrial Waste in Spain

摘要

This paper reveals that the design of the green taxes levied on the production of industrial waste by certain regional governments in Spain does not appear to reduce environmental damage. This may be because these taxes try to mitigate financial shorts, tax rates are too low and are fixed arbitrarily, and agents react to tax differentials across regions by disposing of their waste in regions with lower or null tax rates or illegally dumping it. This suggests that the environmental issues related to the disposal of industrial waste should be supervised by the national government or somehow coordinated across regions.