Behind the display of Tunisian climate commitments, the numbers tell another story: that of a green tax that brings in more and more revenue, yet weighs less and less on the polluting behaviors it is supposed to curb.
Tunisia has committed, on paper, to almost every climate battle under the sun. Low-carbon national strategy, solar plan, nationally determined contribution: the texts are plentiful. What is missing is the signal that the state truly sends through its taxes. For behind the display of green commitments, Tunisian taxation continues, in practice, to tax very little the pollution it is supposed to discourage.
A principle fifty years old
The idea is not new. As early as 1972, the Stockholm Declaration enshrined the polluter pays principle, theorized by the British economist Arthur Pigou: to integrate the cost of pollution into the price of the goods that produce it, so that producers and consumers change their behavior.
Twenty years later, the Rio Declaration officially inscribed this logic into international law, before it became a standard of the OECD. In Tunisia, the idea took time to filter beyond conventional environmental regulation, but the latest finance laws have begun to embrace it, under the combined pressure of climate change and the country’s international commitments.
A hard-hitting diagnosis
It is the finding laid out, without equivocation, in a policy note published by the Tunisian Institute for Competitiveness and Quantitative Studies (ITCEQ) as part of the Savoirs Éco Tunisie program supported by the European Union. It states that there does not exist, properly speaking, a genuine ecological tax in Tunisia, in the sense of a coherent framework designed as an environmental protection tool.
The existing taxes, it writes, only very imperfectly fulfill their role as price signals, whether through rates deemed too low in light of environmental damages, or through their base, poorly connected to the pollutant they are meant to target.
Rising revenues, shrinking impact
