The Ramón Areces Foundation has awarded a "Senior Research Grant in Social Sciences" to Raúl Bajo-Buenestado, researcher at the Navarre Center for International Development of the Culture and Society Institute (ICS) of the University of Navarra. This grant will fund his research project entitled "Environmental policies, social inequality and equity criteria".

The project highlights the importance of addressing human activities related to pollutant emissions and their impacts on public health and climate change. According to the researcher, although some policies have been successful in improving market efficiency by internalizing external costs, their impact on equity and redistribution of benefits has been ignored.

Through empirical examinations, he aims to demonstrate that, despite restoring market efficiency, these policies effectively benefit higher-income households, generating inequality and social polarization. 

The objective of this research project proposal is to provide empirical evidence of the trade-off between efficiency and equity posed by many of the environmental policies currently in place, and to quantify the extent of this trade-off, i.e., to estimate the loss in terms of economic and social inequality that a reduction of the negative environmental externalities induced by these policies entails.

In this context, the research will propose alternative instruments to minimize the negative effects on low-income households. Furthermore, it aims to highlight the trade-off between efficiency and equity in environmental policies and to quantify the economic and social losses derived from the reduction of negative externalities on the environment.