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Pigouvian tax

Pigouvian tax noun: a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities.

Noun

Pigouvian tax (plural Pigouvian taxes)

  1. A tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities.
    • Named after economist A.C. Pigou, a Pigouvian tax is a tax levied per unit of pollution emitted. Pigouvian taxes are meant to internalize ‘externalities’, generally understood to be positive or negative side-effects from economic production that are not reflected in the price of production.2016, Cinnamon P. Carlarne, Kevin R. Gray, Richard Tarasofsky, editors, The Oxford Handbook of International Climate Change Law, Oxford University Press, →ISBN

Forms of Pigouvian tax

pluralPigouvian taxes
alternative formPigovian tax

Questions about Pigouvian tax

What does Pigouvian tax mean?
Pigouvian tax means a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities.
What part of speech is Pigouvian tax?
Pigouvian tax is a noun.
What is the plural of Pigouvian tax?
The plural of Pigouvian tax is Pigouvian taxes.

Words near Pigouvian tax in the dictionary

  1. Pigou effect
  2. Pigou effects
  3. pigout
  4. pigouts
  5. Pigouvian
  6. Pigouvian tax
  7. Pigouvian taxes
  8. Pigovian
  9. Pigovian tax
  10. Pigovian taxes
  11. pigpen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Pigouvian tax (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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