Switzerland news portal watson.ch recently published an article under the following title: «ETH-Forscher: So führt man CO2-Steuern ein, ohne politischen Selbstmord zu begehen»

The researchers conducted conjoint choice experiments embedded in representative surveys of German and U.S. citizens. On the basis of these experiments, they sought to identify the effect of specific forms of carbon taxation upon public acceptance, willingness to pay for carbon taxation, and the causal effect of revenue recycling in this regard. These experiments were fielded in Germany and the United States, given their global prominence in climate negotiations and in view of notable differences in general public support for climate policy and more general taxation acceptance. Their intention was to find out how well empirical findings travel across different country contexts.

Their findings provide strong support for the hypothesis that revenue recycling can increase citizens’ support for carbon taxation and, more specifically, that it can increase the willingness to pay at a rate that is likely to induce major emission cuts. These results suggest that policy makers should not shy away from public debate around the usage of revenues from carbon taxation under the presumption that this could engender distributional conflict and prevent the adoption of carbon taxes altogether.

Their study also focused on support for carbon tax policy in two major industrialized countries. This choice reflects the current attention that this policy has faced in these countries, as well as their global importance in climate diplomacy and finance. Nevertheless, the pricing of carbon remains beyond these countries. As China and India are two of the largest global emitters, pricing carbon emissions in these countries will also be important to achieve effective global reductions. Prof. Bernauer and Liam Beiser-​McGrath's research finds that the inclusion of these countries is not sufficient to boost public support for carbon taxation substantially in Germany and the United States. However, future research could examine the opposite side of this coin, by examining how support for the adoption or expansion of a carbon tax in China and India, respectively, depends on the efforts of industrialized countries in general and Germany and the United States in particular.