Replication For: \"Does green taxation drive countries toward the carbon efficiency frontier?\"

A country is on the carbon efficiency frontier if its per-capita emissions of CO2 are at least as low as any state that was at least as economically developed at a period when technology was no more advanced. Building on earlier work employing Data Envelopment Analysis to benchmark performance, we argue that a useful measure of whether a state adopts “good practice” in relation to climate change is how near it is to this frontier. We calculate efficiency scores for a sample of developed countries between 1994 and 2011, and model the impact of green taxation, next to a series of political and economic controls, on performance. We find that higher levels of environmental tax revenue are positively and significantly associated with higher carbon efficiency. The central contributions of this research are the introduction of an innovative measure for environmental quality and assessing how this is driven by green taxation.

若某国的二氧化碳人均排放量，不高于同期技术水平未更先进、且经济发展程度至少相当的所有国家，则该国处于碳效率前沿（carbon efficiency frontier）。本研究依托此前采用数据包络分析（Data Envelopment Analysis）开展绩效基准测评的相关工作，提出判断一国在气候变化应对领域是否采用‘良好实践’的有效指标，即该国与上述碳效率前沿的贴近程度。本研究针对1994年至2011年的发达国家样本测算效率得分，并在纳入一系列政治与经济控制变量的前提下，构建模型分析绿色税收对碳排放绩效的影响。研究发现，环境税收收入规模越高，与碳效率提升呈显著正向相关关系。本研究的核心贡献在于，提出了针对环境质量的创新测算指标，并评估了绿色税收对该指标的驱动作用。