Environmental tax reform in the context of recovery from financial crisis

The concept of environmental tax reform (ETR) – also termed ‘green tax reform’ – has become well known in European environmental policy. Various ETRs were implemented in the 1990s in Europe and evaluations indicate that they were successful in achieving policy objectives. Nevertheless, such reforms have been fairly limited in number and scope – perhaps because they have been perceived narrowly as an environmental policy tool, based on shifting the burden of taxes between activities and therefore not aimed at generating new revenues.