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The introduction of environmental taxation policies had reached most European countries by the late 1990s. The pricing of activities considered harmful to the environment has given rise to the design of various economic instruments, such as environmental taxes, aimed at promoting environmental responsibility and at enabling the Kyoto Protocol targets to be met, and at the same time generating a marked increase in tax revenues. The aim of this article is to examine whether convergence in environmental taxation has taken place among 27 EU countries, doing so by analyzing time series and applying unit root tests. Our findings show there has been no such convergence, overall, despite the existence of groups of countries with common patterns of behavior.

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The growing interest and direct impact of carbon trading in the economy have drawn an increasing attention to the evolution of the price of CO2 allowances (European Union Allowances, EUAs) under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). As a novel financial market, the dynamic analysis of its volatility is essential for policymakers to assess market efficiency and for investors to carry out an adequate risk management on carbon emission rights. In this research, the main autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) models were applied to evaluate and analyze the volatility of daily data of the European carbon future prices, focusing on the last finished phase of market operations (phase III, 2013–2020), which is structurally and significantly different from previous phases. Some empirical findings derive from the results obtained. First, the EGARCH (1,1) model exhibits a superior ability to describe the price volatility even using fewer parameters, partly because it allows to collect the sign of the changes produced over time. In this model, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) is lower than ARCH (4) and GARCH (1,1) models, and all its coefficients are significative (p < 0.02). Second, a sustained increase in prices is detected at the end of phase III, which makes it possible to foresee a stabilization path with higher prices for the first years of phase IV. These changes will motivate both companies and individual energy investors to be proactive in making decisions about the risk management on carbon allowances.