Journal article
Social sustainability in the decarbonized welfare state: social policy as a buffer against poverty related to environmental taxes
- Abstract:
- Decarbonization, environmental protection, and sustainable development are more topical than ever. Despite long-standing debates about the regressive profile of environmental taxes, the welfare state’s role in buffering adverse distributive impacts of climate policy is largely unexplored. We examine if social policy shields households from falling into poverty due to environmental taxes tied to consumption. We specifically focus on the importance of income replacement in social insurance and social assistance. To enable detailed assessments of the distributive outcomes of environmental policy, we impute environmental taxes into the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Our comparative analysis of 26 European countries indicates that the welfare state protects households from relative income poverty due to environmental taxes. Moreover, comparisons between educational groups suggest that both social insurance and social assistance play different yet complementary roles in reducing socio-economic gradients in poverty related to environmental taxes.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 752.3KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1177/14680181231217659
Authors
- Publisher:
- SAGE Publications
- Journal:
- Global Social Policy More from this journal
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 36-63
- Publication date:
- 2023-12-27
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1741-2803
- ISSN:
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1468-0181
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1607639
- Local pid:
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pubs:1607639
- Deposit date:
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2025-06-13
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Nelson et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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