Distributive Conflicts and Willingness to Pay for the Environment

Abstract

There are two separate strands of literature dealing with willingness to pay for the environment and with preferences for redistributive policies. Both approaches are not connected in the previous literature One well established result in the literature on redistribution is that income is negatively correlated with demand of redistribution However, previous results suggest that income is positively correlated with willingness to pay taxes to protect the environment One possible explanation is that there exist a distributive conflict between redistributive and environmental taxes. The poor and the rich do not differ in their preferences for the overall level of taxation but on their preferences for specific taxes