Socioeconomic Effects of Reducing Household Carbon Footprints Through Meat Consumption Taxes

ABSTRACT

Beef and sheep products represent the largest emitters of greenhouse gases within the meat group. One way of encouraging Scottish households to substitute purchasing lower carbon footprint meat products such as chicken is through a carbon consumption tax. In this article, the effects of such a tax were studied using a dynamic per capita error correction version of the almost ideal demand system (AIDS). The data used in the analysis were from a Scottish household panel dataset for the years 2006–2011, which allowed disaggregation by three socioeconomic groups. The results suggest that the net application of meat taxes is likely to reduce demand for beef and sheep products irrespective of socioeconomic group. Application of all meat carbon consumption taxes has the potential to reduce household demand for meat products, resulting in a likely 10.5% reduction in Scottish meat emissions.

KEYWORDS:

• Carbon footprint
• consumer behavior
• demand system
• meat products
• Scotland

Notes

^1. Warnatzsch (2013).

^2. Audsley et al. (2009) calculated the meat emissions of the Scottish food chain using their overall British data.

^3. As no households from Shetland have been included in Kantar dataset, the Scottish population excluded the population of Shetland.

^4. These restrictions are imposed during estimation.

^5. This matrix C must be negative semidefinite for the restriction of negativity to be satisfied (Deaton & Muellbauer, 1980b).

^6. The price index used was obtained from House of Commons (2012) in order to adjust 2005 prices.

^7. Due to space constraints, the Phillips-Perron, Phillips-Ouliaris, and Augmented Dickey Fuller tests have not been included in this article. These results are available from the author on request.

^8. White meats are considered to be healthier for humans relative to red meats (McMichael, Powles, Butler, & Uauy, 2007).