A new paper has just been published in the Journal of Sustainable Transport on the distributional impact of air travel taxes. It is a collaboration between our research project and Milena Büchs, Professor at the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds, who is working for the Transport theme of the UK Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions.
The paper uses survey data from the UK to investigate what the distributional impact of different air travel taxation models would be. We find that air travel taxes, and particularly ‘frequent flyer levies’ are distributionally progressive, unlike other kinds of carbon taxes. Relevant for our project though, we find that recent migrants and people with family abroad are more likely to be frequent flyers even when on low incomes. This might make them more vulnerable to air travel taxes.
The article is open access at this address.
Long-distance Society 