Environmental responsibility versus taxation

Taxation, as a tool of environmental economic policy, traditionally aims at generating a discouraging effect upon both the consumer and producer. Environmental degradation should finally stabilize itself. The mechanism of taxation replies to a behavioural stimulus (taxes versus subsidies). Recent economic analyses have not aimed at focusing their studies concerning the very responsibility of economic actors on anything else other than the mechanism of taxation. Taxes thus imply responsible behaviour. We shall attempt to highlight that responsibility could be defined independently from taxation and that the affirmation of responsibility is inversed to taxation. Technically speaking, we shall demonstrate that the taxation extolled by the legislator induces a certain crowding out effect as regards to responsibility. In the first part of this article we shall therefore insist that economic policies in terms of taxation drive away the sentiment of individual responsibility. We shall reason in terms of production and consumption to demonstrate this fact. Finally, we shall insist that a high degree of responsibility could substitute taxation. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.