Carbon taxes and trade spillovers within Europe

Carbon taxation has been suggested among the market based policies to tackle climate change since the early 90’s, often associated to ecological tax reforms rationales. Before the advent of emission trading in the EU, some countries introduced forms of carbon taxation, which is still used to deal with non EU ETS sectors. Due to this historical evolution of environmental policies over the last decades, in presence of a ‘federal system’ that assigns to EU countries the governance of energy and fiscal issues, an heterogeneous set of country driven carbon/energy policy settings is present, which can determine effects on growth and trade. We investigate the possible existence of asymmetries among the European Carbon area countries reaction to the policy adoption responsible to combat climate change via carbon usage reduction.