Who pays for saving the environment?: The distributional effects of fuel taxes in the Netherlands

Fuel taxes can be an important instrument for reducing the emission of greenhouse gasses. However, in many countries these taxes have undesirable (i.e. regressive) distributional effects. We estimated these effects for the Netherlands and found that the tax is just weakly regressive, almost proportional. We also found, by reviewing the existing literature that the distributional effects, greatly depend on the level of welfare, if the country is European or North-American and the methodologies used in the study