How tax policies shape corporate pro-environmental behaviors: Insights from Circular Economy Transitions for Plastic Packaging in Europe
(2026)
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- This dissertation explores how environmental tax policies can foster corporate pro-environmental behaviors and support circular economy transitions, with a particular focus on plastic packaging in Europe. Through three essays, it examines how tax policies are designed, interpreted, and enacted within multi-level regulatory systems. First, a systematic review of 171 articles identifies the conditions under which environmental taxes and subsidies promote corporate pro-environmental behaviors across industries, underscoring the significance of instrument design, contextual factors, and industry specificities. Second, the dissertation analyzes national packaging tax responses to the European Union (EU) Plastic Packaging Levy in the EU and the United Kingdom (UK), demonstrating how divergent tax strategies shape circularity objectives and how plastic packaging taxation interacts with extended producer responsibility schemes and the evolving EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation in steering circular transitions. Third, drawing on qualitative interviews in Spain and the UK, the dissertation explores how stakeholders in the food plastic packaging industry perceive and respond to plastic packaging taxes and regulatory policies embedded in a wider circular policy mix, and how these interactions may reinforce or impede corporate circular practices. Overall, this dissertation advances scholarly understanding of the role of tax policies in sustainability transitions, contributes to debates on policy mixes, policy accumulation, and circular governance, and offers managerial and public policy implications for the design of effective environmental policies.
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De Boe, G. (2026). How tax policies shape corporate pro-environmental behaviors: Insights from Circular Economy Transitions for Plastic Packaging in Europe. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/271833