The gilets jaunes and how NOT to implement an environmental tax: the Tax Justice Network’s December 2018 podcast

In edition 84 of the December 2018 Tax Justice Network’s monthly podcast/radio show, the Taxcast: time’s running out to tackle the climate crisis facing us all. We look at environmental taxes and making them fair, speaking to the authors of new report A Climate of Fairness: Environmental Taxation and Tax Justice in Developing Countries

Plus: we discuss the gilets jaunes in France, a movement that’s been widely reported as being anti-green taxes, but is in fact born from wider desperation for their ‘let them eat cake’ President Macron to reverse a series of policies that have worsened inequality in the country. We give Monsieur le President a lesson in how not to implement an environmental tax…

Featuring:

Tatiana Falcão and Jacqueline Cottrell, authors of the Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation report A Climate of Fairness: Environmental Taxation and Tax Justice in Developing Countries (details below) and John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. Produced and presented by Naomi Fowler, also of the Tax Justice Network.

this is a real economic, tax justice struggle…wherever I went [in France] I heard Macron being described as the plutocrat’s president”

~ John Christensen on the gilets jaunes in France

We have about 10, 12 years to really get the climate problem really under control and really start to bring down our emissions, I hope governments will start to shift towards this higher intervention again and to introducing a carbon price because the alternatives are much worse”

~ Jacqueline Cottrell

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Further Reading:

Full report A Climate of Fairness: Environmental Taxation and Tax Justice in Developing Countries, executive summary here.

Taken from the Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation website on the report’s co-authors:

Jacqueline Cottrell is a freelance environmental policy consultant working for numerous international organizations, including the German development agency GIZ, the United Nations Office for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the German Development Institute (DIE). Jacqueline Cottrell specializes in environmental fiscal policy advisory and research, and capacity development for green economy policies. She is a Senior Policy Advisor at the German CSO Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft and Vice-President of the CSO Green Budget Europe. Jacqueline Cottrell is on the international program committee of the Global Conference on Environmental Taxation. She has published widely in the field of environmental economic policy, including studies for UNOSD, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), GIZ and DIE. Jacqueline studied at the University of Edinburgh and King’s College London, and has an M.A. in International Peace and Security.

Tatiana Falcão is Policy Leader Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute in Florence (Italy) and Visiting Professor at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. She is also member of the UN Tax Committee’s Subcommittee on environmental taxation. She worked as tax expert consultant for the World Economic and Social Survey and as Economic Policy Adviser for the United Nations and at the Secretariat of the UN Tax Committee of Experts. She regularly publishes articles on tax issues in emerging economy countries for Tax Notes International as well as for Valor Econômico. Tatiana Falcão studied at the University of Cambridge and the New York University School of Law. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law at the WU Vienna in which she proposed a Multilateral Carbon Tax Treaty.