In this week's Cornhusker Economics, two authors from the Department of Agricultural Economics, address implications of a meat tax on livestock production and grain production.

Over time, animal activists and environmentalists have made calls to put a tax on meat. What effect would that have? To find out, we estimated the impacts that a retail-level greenhouse gas (GHG) tax on meat would have on livestock and grain markets.

The research used a multimarket economic model that integrates the beef, pork, and poultry markets with the corn, distillers’ grain, soybean, soymeal, and ethanol markets. For GHG taxes, we used those provided by Springman et al. based on an emission price (social cost) of $52 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent estimated by EPA. Emissions by meat type include land use, feed production, livestock production, processing, and transport.

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