Environmental taxes and productivity: Lessons from Canadian manufacturing

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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

This paper investigates how environmental taxes affect manufacturing productivity by examining British Columbia’s revenue-neutral carbon tax. I develop a new hypothesis, the “Productivity Dividend Hypothesis,” to show that environmental taxes can positively affect productivity by recycling tax revenues to reduce corporate income taxes. This revenue-recycling increases investment and could raise productivity more than environmental taxes lower productivity by diverting resources from production. I evaluate this hypothesis using detailed confidential plant-level data. I find that the carbon tax lowers productivity, although this is offset to some extent by the revenue-recycling. For some plants, the policy generates a net gain in productivity.