We use household survey data and income-outcome coefficients to analyze fuel tax incidence in Costa Rica. We find that the effect of a 10 percent fuel price hike through direct spending on gasoline would be progressive, its effect through spending on diesel—both directly and via bus transportation—would be regressive (mainly because poorer households rely heavily on buses), and its effect through spending on goods other than fuel and bus transportation would be relatively small, albeit regressive.

Although fuel taxes are a practical means of curbing vehicular air pollution, congestion, and accidents in developing countries—all of which are typically major problems—they are often opposed on distributional grounds.

The general objective of the thesis is to analyze the political economy of the regulation of Costa Rica’s transport sector and identify the main opportunities and challenges in designing a more integrated regulatory approach for the sector.

Read Francisco Alpizar’ opinion article (Política integral para el sector transporte) about an Integral Transport Policy for Costa Rica published at “La Nacion” (January 8th). (Spanish only)

Switching costs are costs that customers face when switching from one firm to another. In markets such as the airline market where repeated purchases are common, switching costs may be substantial.

This paper analyzes the marginal willingness to pay for changes in noise levels related to changes in the volume of flight movements at a city airport in Stockholm, Sweden, by using a choice experiment.

Using a contingent valuation survey, people’s willingness to pay for a given risk reduction is found to be much larger, consistently more than two times as large, when traveling by air compared to by taxi.

Follow-up questions revealed that an important reason for this discrepancy is that many experience a higher mental suffering from flying, and that they are willing to pay to reduce this suffering. It was also consistently found that people are willing to pay more for a certain risk reduction if the original price was higher. Policy implications are discussed.

The main objective of thus study is to contribute to the design of policies dealing with the problems of congestion and air pollution in the urban context of a typical developing country.

This paper provides an overview and a discussion of environmental taxes in Europe. On the whole, most European countries have fairly high levels of environmental taxation – at least compared to the US.

This paper undertakes a social cost-benefit analysis regarding an increase in the number of electric vehicles in the Swedish transport sector by year 2010.