Lutz Sager has recently published a new paper in the Journal of Economic Literature entitled “The Economics of Inequality and the Environment”.

Distributional tensions around environmental policy are now hard to miss — from the gilets jaunes protests against fuel taxes to growing government attention to “environmental justice” and a “just transition” in the US, EU, and beyond. In this paper, Lutz and his coauthors map out three major ways inequality and environmental issues intertwine. They examine who benefits from environmental quality, who bears the costs of environmental policies, and how inequality feeds back into environmental degradation. The authors argue that future research and policy need to tackle both challenges together rather than in isolation.