IESET.
Policies·au_carbon_tax_repeal_2014

Carbon Tax Repeal (2014)

AUS·2011 2014·enacted 2011-11-18candidate
movesenvironmental stringencysectoral subsidyenergy supply securityproduct market competition

What the policy did

The Clean Energy Act 2011 (in force 1 July 2012) imposed a fixed carbon price of AUD 23/tCO2e on ~500 largest emitters, rising 2.5% real annually, with transition to an emissions-trading scheme scheduled for 2015 and a link to the EU ETS planned. Enactment depended on a Labor–Greens–Independents minority agreement after the 2010 election, despite Gillard's 2010 campaign pledge against a carbon tax. The Abbott Coalition campaigned on repeal, won the 2013 election, and passed the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Act 2014 on 17 July 2014, replacing carbon pricing with the Emissions Reduction Fund (reverse-auction subsidy). The Safeguard Mechanism (2016, reformed by Albanese 2023) later re-introduced a baseline- and-credit scheme for large facilities. The framework codes the full enactment-and-repeal episode as one movement: the environmental- stringency axis moved + then − within three years, a rare revealed- preference reversal of a price-based climate instrument in a developed economy.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

intended
environmental stringency
regulatory.environmental_stringency
Environmental regulation stringency — emissions caps, standards, phase-out mandates, carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards.
unchanged · moderate
+ in 2012-2014, strong − with 2014 repeal; subsequent ERF/Safeguard partially rebuilt stringency through non-price instruments. (recoded mixed→0 during movement→policy migration)
sectoral subsidy
fiscal.sectoral_subsidy
Targeted industrial and sectoral subsidies (renewable energy, chip manufacturing, agriculture, green hydrogen, etc).
increased · moderate
expanded sectoral subsidies
Repeal substituted a reverse-auction subsidy (ERF) for the price instrument; fiscal-channel climate intervention persisted.
energy supply security
regulatory.energy_supply_security
Policy posture toward energy supply security — domestic production capacity, import diversification, strategic reserves, nuclear stance, fossil-fuel mix discipline.
unchanged · weak
Abundant coal and gas resource base meant the axis was not the binding constraint in either phase.
product market competition
regulatory.product_market_competition
Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.
unchanged · weak

Enacted by

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

The Soviet central-planning system, having already exhibited TFP stagnation 1970-1989, underwent a canonical institutional and economic collapse 1989-1998 as plan-enforcement was withdrawn without functioning market institutions in place.
soviet_union_central_planning_gdp_collapse_1989_1991inferred
viaregulatory.product_market_competition
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']
run pending
Among high-income economies 1990-2020, services-sector competition — measured by low barriers to entry, low incumbent-protection scores, and high churn in retail, transport, communications, and professional services — predicts long-run prosperity (real GDP per capita growth and labour-productivity growth) better than manufacturing-specific industrial policy spending.
sectoral_competition_services_productivityinferred
viaregulatory.product_market_competitionfiscal.sectoral_subsidy
PARTIAL — coef=+0.000842, p=0.361 (above α=0.05); direction inconclusive
partial
Germany's industrial electricity prices diverged upward from a basket of comparable industrial peers (United States, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland) after the 2011 Energiewende pivot and the gap widened further through the 2014 nuclear-phase-out milestones and the 2022 gas crisis.
german_energiewende_industrial_cost_trajectoryinferred
viaregulatory.energy_supply_securityfiscal.sectoral_subsidyregulatory.environmental_stringency
refuted — Germany's industrial GVA gap on 2015-2020 average is +0.095 log (wrong sign for industrial-cost-penalty story), placebo p=0.4444444444444444.
refuted
German industrial gross value added, manufacturing output, and real household income diverged materially from a synthetic-Germany donor- pool counterfactual over 2018-2025, and a variance decomposition across candidate channels attributes the majority of the divergence to regulatory-channel factors (Environmental Policy Stringency index increase post-2017, nuclear-phase-out schedule, single-supplier Russian gas dependency lock-in, industrial emission and reporting rules) rather than to fiscal-channel factors (general government consumption and tax burden were broadly stable across the Merkel late-term and Scholz years, with the debt brake in effect until 2023).
germany_decline_2018_2025_regulatory_not_fiscalinferred
viaregulatory.energy_supply_securityregulatory.environmental_stringency
partial — DEU below synthetic by -0.251 cumulative over 2018-2022 (sign correct), but magnitude or placebo p=0.36363636363636365 below pre-registered thresholds…
partial
Across a broad panel of economies 1980-2020, market reforms (privatisation, trade liberalisation, and price decontrol) produce durable gains in real GDP per capita growth only when rule-of-law scores exceed a minimum threshold (WGI Rule of Law > -0.5, approximately the 40th percentile of the global distribution).
rule_of_law_market_reform_complementarityinferred
viaregulatory.product_market_competition
REFUTED — coef=-0.1483 (sign opposite claim +), p=0.00481
refuted
Countries with aggressive green-transition regulatory stringency layered on top of gas-indexed wholesale electricity markets and premature phase-out of firm-dispatchable generation (Germany, UK, Belgium, Netherlands) have experienced materially higher industrial electricity prices 2015-2023 than comparable economies with more measured transition paths (France's nuclear retention, Nordic hydro, USA's shale-gas-backed grid).
green_transition_cost_trajectory_electricity_pricesinferred
viaregulatory.energy_supply_securityregulatory.environmental_stringency
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — treatment 'aggressive_green_transition_dummy' has no within-country variation under country fixed effects
run pending
Policy-driven nuclear phaseouts produce a three-order causal chain.
nuclear_phaseout_energy_cost_industry_exitinferred
viaregulatory.energy_supply_securityregulatory.environmental_stringency
PARTIAL — mean_gap=+0.04357, |gap|/pre_sd=8.7, p_perm=0.25; claim direction ambiguous
partial
Across a broad panel of developing and emerging-market economies 1980-2020, price controls and directed input subsidies predict higher capital misallocation — measured by the dispersion of the marginal product of capital across firms or sectors — and lower long-run total-factor-productivity growth.
price_signal_distortion_capital_misallocationinferred
viaregulatory.product_market_competitionfiscal.sectoral_subsidy
PARTIAL — coef=+0.008607, p=0.542 (above α=0.05); direction inconclusive
partial

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

References

Notes

Migrated from movements/australia_carbon_tax_repeal_2014.yaml (action=CONVERT). This entity is a single policy/legislation, not a coalition era; reclassified to policies/. Original movement file deleted.