The reform of the European energy tax directive: Exploring potential economic impacts in the EU27

The aim of this study is to analyze the effect that the Energy Tax Directive reform proposed in 2011 would have, if implemented, on the level of prices in the different sectors of the 27 countries of the European Union. We apply a multiregional and multisectoral model of trade flows that takes into account all the intersectoral and intercountry interdependences in the production processes. Using the World Input-Output Database we perform two different simulations. The first one considers the tax changes proposed by the reform; the second one shows the impact the reform would have entailed if it were applied also to sectors belonging to the European Trade System. The main finding of the first simulation shows that the new energy tax regime would have had a low economic cost in terms of impact on prices (less than 1% in all the countries). So, the concerns about competitiveness do not find empirical support in our results, suggesting the need for further analyses to find out the reasons that caused the failure of a reform that was an important step to introduce a taxation explicitly linked to CO2 emissions. The second simulation, however, leads to strongly different results, pointing out the relevance of maintaining significant economic incentives to reduce carbon emissions for the European Trade System sectors, by improving the emission market performance or by applying carbon taxation also to these sectors.