Carbon pricing index

Carbon pricing index & environmental policy stringency

As carbon taxes, cap-and-trade systems and other environmental-focused legislations arose, several institutions explored and compared the proposed mechanisms. As options are now numerous and extremely diverse, this page proposes a focus on relevant datasets to incorporate national indicators in your analysis.

Please note that this page is part of ongoing work and is subject to change. To date, it inventories both proprietary and external methodologies and data.

In case you have any remark/question regarding the topic of this page, or if you know of any alternative relevant source, please contact us.



ILB carbon pricing index

A lot of researchers from both economics and finance use carbon pricing data in their respective research. Useful raw data can be downloaded for free from the State and Trends of Carbon Pricing Dashboard, an interactive online tool aimed at policymakers, businesses, and researchers developped by the World Bank. It provides the latest information on existing and emerging direct carbon pricing initiatives around the world.Yet, it does not allow for an immediate comparison between countries.

Thus, the Pladifes Team considered there was value in creating and sharing a preprocessed version of the carbon pricing data, focused on easing the countries comparison. The methodology involves creating a new data: a "carbon pricing index", per country and per year, based on a sumproduct between prices and coverages. The full methodology is described in a pdf, accessible below.

As this work is mostly based on the State and Trends of Carbon Pricing Dashboard, the final data quality depends on this source. A limitation is that the carbon prices are nominal prices as at April 1 of the relevant year. These are generally based on the exchange-traded, auction or government-set prices of April 1, or the most recent prices available. Thus, a country implementing a new instrument between April and December of year n would see it appear only in year n+1.

Users are required to cite as follows: "Work based on Carbon pricing index data, shared by the EquipEx Pladifes (ANR-21-ESRE-0036) and hosted at the Institut Louis Bachelier".
Methodology & Data Guide Download dataset

OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index

The OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index (EPS) is a country-specific and internationally comparable measure of the stringency of environmental policy ranging from zero (least stringent) to six (most stringent). The index covers the years from 1990 to 2020, across 40 countries and 13 policy instruments, focusing on climate change and air pollution mitigation policies. The structure of the EPS, its components and the index construction can be accessed in the related 2022 OECD working paper: https://doi.org/10.1787/90ab82e8-en. This paper updates the 2014 working paper and index: https://doi.org/10.1787/5jxrjnc45gvg-en.
Access data on OECD Data Explorer

World Carbon Pricing Database

The World Carbon Pricing Database explores carbon prices arising from carbon pricing mechanisms around the world since 1990. This is achieved by mapping information available for each carbon pricing mechanism (carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems) onto various jurisdictions. In practice, alongside information on the sectors and fuels targeted by a pricing mechanism, authors also record the jurisdictions in which it is in force.

To our knowledge, intelectual property over this project is shared between Geoffroy Dolphin and the Ressource for the Future (RFF) institute.
Dashboard accessible on RFF Github of the project