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Is the Environment a Luxury?
DOI link for Is the Environment a Luxury?
Is the Environment a Luxury? book
Is the Environment a Luxury?
DOI link for Is the Environment a Luxury?
Is the Environment a Luxury? book
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ABSTRACT
The purpose of this collection of essays is to shed some light on the complex relationship between environmental quality and the distribution of income. Are the preferences of the poor towards a cleaner environment really different from those of the rich?
Environmental economists have traditionally focused on efficiency issues. In their analyses the quality of the environment is usually related to aggregate or average variables, like per capita income; policy recommendations are usually formulated considering efficiency with no regard for equity and also the predicted effects of policies are evaluated in aggregate terms.
The essays collected in this volume go into the problem of the relationship between environmental quality and income distribution. The book’s opening essay shows how different theories of economic growth and environmental quality seem to suggest that the higher the level of income the higher is the value of environmental protection. The essays that follow, a mix of already published papers and of papers solicited for this book, analyse the relationship between environmental quality and income distribution from different perspectives (both micro and macro) and on the basis of more than one methodology.
This book highlights that the preferences of the poor towards a cleaner environment may differ from those of the rich, but income is also very likely to represent only one factor affecting them. The essays consider other relevant factors affecting preferences for environmental quality. What clearly emerges is that the distribution of costs and benefits of environmental policies is the key for their successful implementation, and that further research is needed to both address the distributional effects themselves and the strategies to mitigate them.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |2 pages
Part I Income and environmental quality: theory and empirics
chapter 2|21 pages
Willingness to pay for environmental quality: testable empirical implications of the growth and environment literature
chapter 3|15 pages
The income elasticity of the impact of climate change
part |2 pages
Part II The distributional incidence of benefits of environmental improvements
chapter 5|23 pages
How much do we care about air quality improvements? Evidence from Italian households
part |2 pages
Part III The distributional incidence of the costs of environmental policies: the case of carbon/energy taxes
chapter 6|27 pages
Household-level studies on the distributional impact of carbon/energy taxes
chapter 7|29 pages
Carbon pricing and distributional effects on firms: a methodological survey
chapter 8|32 pages
Distributional effects of carbon pricing in Ireland: a computational general equilibrium approach
part |2 pages
Part IV The role of fairness and distributional weights in environmental public goods provision