Optimal differentiation of international environmental taxes in the presence of national labor market distortions

We explore the implication of the ‘double dividend’ debate for international environmental taxes. In our scenario, small open economies with different labor market distortions follow a common environmental policy and use national environmental tax revenues to finance labor tax cuts. Since the double dividend hypothesis does not hold, a high labor tax implies a low environmental tax relative to other countries. The optimal differentiation of international environmental taxes is proven to be a function of the national labor tax rates and the uncompensated elasticities of labor supply