Im Rahmen der Ökologisierung von Abgabensystemen spielen föderale Aspekte in der Regel keine Rolle. Die finanzwissenschaftliche
Literatur bietet jedoch Kriterien zur Festlegung der staatlichen Ebene, die für die Bepreisung unterschiedlicher negativer
Externalitäten am besten geeignet wäre. Im österreichischen Kontext wären sowohl die stärkere Ökologisierung des Abgabensystems
als auch in bestimmten Bereichen eine stärkere Dezentralisierung umweltbezogener Steuern und Abgaben überlegenswert.
While taxes on wealth for a long time played only a marginal role in the public finance and taxation literature, the increase
of wealth inequality and concentration in many EU countries has spurred new interest in wealth taxation. At the same time,
recurrent net wealth taxes have almost completely disappeared in Europe, inter alia due to fears of asset and taxpayer migration.
The paper provides estimates of the revenue that could be raised from an EU-wide net wealth tax enabling the containment of
migration responses, using data from the Household, Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). To account for differential non-response,
we augment the HFCS with data from the Forbes rich list as well as national rich lists and replace the top tail of the wealth
distribution according to the HFCS by an estimated Pareto distributed top tail. To account for underreporting we scale aggregate
financial assets in the HFCS to match their counterparts outlined in the National Accounts. We estimate that a moderately
progressive net wealth tax levied at a rate of 1 percent on net wealth between 1 and 5 million €, and 1.5 percent on wealth
above 5 million €, could raise between 165 and 177 billion € after accounting for avoidance and evasion responses. Such an
EU harmonised net wealth tax would affect only a small fraction of households, ranging between 0.41 percent in Latvia and
8.65 percent in Belgium.
In view of the challenges posed by climate change and the increasingly ambitious climate targets around the world, the search
for effective climate policy instruments is gaining momentum. Carbon pricing, for example, in the form of a carbon tax, and
its effects are therefore attracting increasing attention in academic as well as policy discussions. We review the empirical
effects of carbon taxes with regard to several impact dimensions commonly studied in the literature: environmental effectiveness,
macroeconomic effects, impacts on competitiveness and innovation, distributional implications, and public acceptance. An increasing
body of empirical studies shows that carbon taxes can effectively reduce carbon emissions or at least dampen their growth
while not negatively affecting economic growth, employment, and competitiveness. The existing empirical evidence suggests
that the distributional impact of carbon taxes depends on the type of energy use and the indicators to capture distributional
effects, as well as on household characteristics. Lump-sum transfers are shown to be better suited to mitigate regressive
effects for lower incomes, while higher incomes benefit more from a reduction of labour taxes. Public acceptance of carbon
taxes can be increased by providing public information, avoiding negative distributional effects, and channelling part of
the revenues into "environmental projects".
Mitte 2022 wird in Österreich im Rahmen der "ökosozialen Steuerreform" mit der Bepreisung von CO2 ein neues Werkzeug im Mix
der klimapolitischen Instrumente verfügbar. Österreich folgt mit dieser Bepreisung von Treibhausgasen einer sowohl in Europa
als auch global immer stärker werdenden Tendenz. Dieses Instrument soll Anreize für die Restrukturierung des Wirtschafts-
und Lebensstils setzen, die nicht nur den Klimawandel eindämmen hilft, sondern auch Wohlstand, Resilienz und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit
stärkt.
