Stone Centre-funded research on inequality and carbon taxation becomes a new Doing Economics project

A new project in CORE Econ’s Doing Economics has been built around survey-experiment data from a Stone Centre-funded project on inequality and climate policy.

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The new Doing Economics project, "The politics of carbon taxation", draws directly on a survey-experiment dataset developed by Stone Centre grant recipient David Hope (Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, King’s College London), together with Julian Limberg (Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, King’s College London) and Yves Steinebach (Associate Professor, University of Oslo), as part of their Stone Centre-funded research paper, Inequality perceptions and preferences for carbon taxation.

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Carbon taxes are widely regarded by economists as one of the most effective mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change. Despite strong support within the profession, however, real-world adoption of carbon taxes has remained limited, largely because of political and public resistance.

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The Stone Centre-funded research set out to ask why public support for carbon taxes is so low, and in particular whether the distributive implications of these taxes act as a drag on support in times of high inequality. Because carbon taxes are levied on consumption, they tend to fall relatively more heavily on lower-income households, and regressive taxes tend to be less popular with voters than progressive ones. To test how perceptions of inequality shape policy preferences, the team ran randomised information-provision survey experiments with representative samples in four OECD countries: the UK, Germany, Italy, and Norway.

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The new Doing Economics project, authored by David Hope, Julian Limberg, and CORE editorial board member Eileen Tipoe (Reader in Economics, Queen Mary University of London), uses this dataset to help students explore how perceptions of fairness and unequal treatment shape support for carbon taxation. Students will also investigate the determinants of rural opposition to carbon taxation, a pattern that has emerged in several countries in recent years, and learn how information-provision survey experiments work as a research methodology, including their causal logic and their limitations.

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You can read more about the underlying Stone Centre-funded research here, or explore the new Doing Economics project on the CORE website.

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Doing Economics is a unique, free resource for learning a valuable array of data-handling, software and statistical skills that will be transferable to other courses and to the workplace.