Assessment of the impact of progressive carbon taxation strategies on Supply Chain’s strategic decisions and performances

The carbon tax legislation has been widely advocated as a cost-efficient law to push companies to reduce their carbon emission through their supply chain's (SC) activities. Based on a carbon emission reduction's target, different carbon taxation strategies have been implemented around the world. Generally, governments launch the carbon tax with a relatively low carbon price and plan to increase it incrementally over the years by adopting various strategies in a way to attend their emission reduction objective. The majority of developed mathematical models within the green supply chain design (GSCD) under carbon tax legislation have ignored the dynamic aspect of this legislation. Within this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature by studying the impact of the dynamic carbon tax legislations on the strategic decisions of a SC, its economic and environmental performances. Within this optic, we study the technology investment problem under different progressive strategies of carbon taxation, mainly a linear, a convex and a concave carbon taxes functions as well as a constant carbon tax law. Our objective is to assess and compare the efficiency of these progressive strategies for the purpose of assisting companies that are greening their SCs, in finding a compromise between reducing their carbon emissions and increasing their profits.