Revealed and stated preferences for CO2 emissions reduction: The missing link

In this paper we combine data collected from two strands of literature dealing with revealed preferences expressed by conventional vehicle drivers for fuel price variation and stated preferences expressed by consumers for alternative fuel vehicles. We employ a meta-analysis approach drawing data on 30 primary studies, reflecting two important policy interventions, which are fuel price taxation and subsidies for alternative fuel vehicles. This is a new contribution in environmental and energy economics in that we rescale all primary information into a unique index, which captures consumers’ economic attitude towards carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction in monetary terms. Focusing on the transport sector, we compute the implicit price for the avoidance of a kilogram of CO2 emissions, named PCO2, explaining the existing heterogeneity from several points of view. The results of the meta-analysis show that contextual and individual characteristics influence the implicit price for CO2 emissions avoidance. This implicit price is on average positive in the case of revealed preferences studies, whereas it is negative in the stated preferences studies. Although there are some important geographical differences, our results show that fuel taxes could be an important additional instrument for environmental policy.