The focus of the 4th Virtual Meeting of the Community of Practice on Tax Expenditures will be the impact of tax expenditures on the environment and implications for climate change, with inputs from Lucas W. Davis (Research Associate, University of California, Berkeley, USA) and Juan Carlos Brenes Brenes (Director General de Hacienda, Ministry of Finance of Costa Rica).
Lucas W. Davis’s presentation will mainly focus on the paper he co-authored with Severin Borenstein in 2024 The Distributional Effects of U.S. Tax Credits for Heat Pumps, Solar Panels, and Electric Vehicles. This research explores the economic dynamics of clean energy tax credits in the United States over the past two decades. The study investigates the impact and distribution of tax incentives designed to promote the adoption of emerging clean energy technologies across different income segments. Juan Carlos Brenes will explain Costa Rica’s method of identifying and quantifying environmental tax expenditures and will focus on the process they are going through to reform some of them.
Building on the momentum and vast interest generated by the Regional Workshops on Tax Expenditures, ATI, CEP and IDOS have initiated a Community of Practice (CoP) on TEs. The objective of the Community of Practice (CoP) is to provide all attendees from ATI partner countries and other interested parties with a platform to continue discussions regarding TE estimation, evaluation, reporting, and reform. In doing so, the CoP aspires to leverage the collective expertise of its members to enhance TE governance across finance ministries, revenue administrations, parliaments, and beyond.
The first meeting, held in October 2024, provided a high-level overview of tax expenditures governance, featuring two presentations from S. Tunny Cooper (Liberia Revenue Authority) and Pande Putu Oka Kusumawardani (Ministry of Finance of Indonesia). The second session, organized in December 2024, discussed TE reporting and transparency, with a presentation by Alban Romaric Alladaye (Ministry of Economy and Finance of Benin) and the launch of the newest version of the GTETI (1.1) by Lucas Millan-Narotzky (CEP). The third meeting convened in February 2025 had TE evaluation in focus with presentations by Gerard McGuinness and Cillian O’Neill (Department of Finance of Ireland) and Tantely Ravelomanana (Ministry of Economy and Finance of Madagascar).