Annex to press release about Taxation, Innnovation and the Environment, 13 October 2010

 

In line with the increased importance attached to environmental issues, the OECD has scaled up its work on the nexus between tax policies and environmental policies – and with the Green Growth Strategy under preparation for the OECD Ministerial Meeting in May 2011, this process will continue in coming years. More information is available at .

• The OECD’s Joint Meetings of Tax and Environment Experts bring together officials from Tax and Environment Ministries from OECD and partner countries to exchange information and experience with the use of environmentally-related taxation.
  
  
• The report released today has been prepared by the Joint Meetings. It follows on from a report on The Political Economic of Environmentally Related Taxes (see www.oecd.org/env/taxes/politicaleconomy).
  
  
• Recent discussions of the Joint Meetings have also addressed the renewed interest in CO2 taxes – a key component in the post-Copenhagen tax policy agenda. These discussions are reflected in the interim report on the OECD Green Growth Strategy (see www.oecd.org/greengrowth).
  
  
• Subsidies and tax expenditures related to fossil fuels need to be reviewed in order to avoid that unintended incentives boost the production and consumption of fossil fuels, adding to green house gas emissions. The OECD has contributed to the work on G20 by identifying examples of fossil fuel tax expenditures (see www.oecd.org/g20/fossilfuelsubsidies).
  
  
• A project on the tax treatment of tradable emission permits seeks to identify the ways in which the treatment of permits in corporate income taxes, sales taxes and value added taxes etc. might interact with the operation of cap-and-trade and similar schemes. Ultimately the aim is to ensure the integrity of tax systems and that emission trading operates in a way that achieves its objectives of inducing emission abatement where it has the least resource costs (see www.oecd.org/dataoecd/21/13/44604740.pdf)
  
  
• A database on environmentally related taxes in OECD and partner countries is maintained with up-to-date information about tax rates, based and exemptions etc. (see www.oecd.org/env/policies/database).
  

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