Odd that a country like Oz in which economic reform has been such a buzzword, in which economists have, over the last generation had so much influence, have had so little impact on doing something so obviously sensible, which is to move as far as possible from the taxation of 'goods' to the taxation of 'bads'.
It's hard to detect any ideological patterns here. The Nordics do a bit better than the Anglosphere, if you correct for their larger than usual tax take (which would mean their green tax revenue would be a substantially higher proportion of GDP than suggested in the graph to the left).
There's also a few of the more newly industrialising economies on the right hand (good) side of the graph - like Turkey and Korea and the Eastern European countries. Â Perhaps they've got more advice from economists. Who knows?
But I wish we scored better than we do.
whats "good' and whats 'bad'? What is being measured.
You could always pay more tax voluntarily, Nicholas.
Maybe we should make donations to the ATO tax-deductible.
Doesn't this depend upon how "bad" the society is? The "bad demand curve"?
What is it those Turks are getting up to?
"Green taxes" seems a bit vague. Where did the chart come from? I should have thought we looked pretty good, average or just above. Only a few countries have materially higher green taxes. Also, I had the impression that most of Europe has dramatically higher fuel taxes.
Curios about NZ , do they generate a lot of fossil carbon in the first plac?
Apologies all, I should have included the url of the initial post, which has links to the study from which the diagram comes from if you want to follow it up. (I haven't).
I remember petrol being fantastically expensive in Turkey due to taxes - the linked article mentions this is part of the reason for the USA's low ranking and it's the biggest tax on pollution I can think of.
I find it very hard to believe that Green taxes in Australia are higher than in Germany and some other large EU countries. I presume that they are not taking into account the EU ETS, which isn't explicitly a tax but implicitly is?
LO,
They are probably also ignoring the feed-in tariffs paid for solar PV. Just shows how this is a difficult thing to measure.