ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Reducing Air Pollution: Are Environmental Taxes
Enough to Help the EU Member States Reach
Climate Neutrality by 2050?
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Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Department of Finance, Bucharest, Romania, 010961
Submission date: 2020-10-12
Final revision date: 2020-12-28
Acceptance date: 2021-01-20
Online publication date: 2021-06-11
Publication date: 2021-07-29
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2021;30(5):4205-4218
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ABSTRACT
Recently, the European Union has officially announced that its’ objective in terms of environmental
policy is to achieve climate neutrality, including long-term low greenhouse gas emission, by 2050.
In light of this, the current study aims to offer a new and updated perspective on the effectiveness
of environmental taxes in reducing air pollution in the European Union. Firstly, cluster analysis
is used to group the member states of the European Union according to characteristics that will
make the research results more robust. Secondly, panel data dynamic error correction models were
estimated for each cluster to assess the effect of environmental taxes (and other explanatory variables)
on emissions of carbon dioxide on the one hand, and greenhouse gases in general on the other hand.
The research looks at both short-run and long-run effects on air pollution. The results show a statistically
significant negative long-run relationship between environment taxes and atmospheric pollutants
emissions. However, this effect would happen with a certain delay and it would be short lived, which
makes additional environment policy measures necessary to achieve the 2050 targets.