Progressive Environmental Tax Reforms

European countries have increased their use of environmental tax instruments by designing new tax bases. But many countries face the opposition of public opinion that fears the distributive consequences of these environmental tax reforms. A paper co-authored by Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline sheds light on the distributive consequences of environmental tax policies when households are heterogeneous. The objective is to assess whether an environmental tax reform could be Pareto improving when the revenue of the pollution tax is recycled by a change in the labour tax properties. She shows that whatever the degree of regressivity of the environmental tax alone, it is possible to design a recycling mechanism that renders the tax reform Pareto improving by simultaneously decreasing the average rate of the wage tax and increasing its progressivity.

Ms Chiroleu-Assouline's fields of research are environmental economics, public economics and taxation. She started her academic career as an applied macroeconomist and has extensive experience in economic modelling and policy ex-ante evaluation, including the first European carbon tax projects, which led her to environmental economics. Her main research and teaching interests are in environmental regulation, and her studies cover a large range of topics, using different methodologies. She has published several papers about environmental tax reforms, the double dividend and equity issues. She is also interested in analysing firms' behaviour induced by households' green awareness: corporate social and environmental responsibility, eco-labelling, greenwashing and lobbying.

Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline is Professor of Economics at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Research Fellow in the Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne and Associate Member of the Paris School of Economics. Her previous appointments included: Associate Professor of Economics at École Centrale Paris and Professor and Director of the Department of Economics and Management at the Université du Maine in Le Mans. After graduating as an engineer from Ecole Centrale Paris, one of the leading French Grandes Ecoles, she received her PhD in Economics at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has been a member of the French Commission for Environmental Accounts and Economics (2011–2014). Since 2015, she is Member of the Scientific Committee for the Social Sciences at Science Europe. She has been on the scientific programme committee of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists' (EAERE) annual conferences for several years. Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline is also Vice-President of the French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (FAERE) established in June 2013.