The Impact of Environmental Protection Tax on Plastic Bag Use: A Case Study of Vietnam

The study investigates the impact of the environmental protection tax, along with other factors such as attitude, subjective norm, environmental concern, and the availability of substitutes on the use of plastic bags in Vietnam. To achieve this objective, a questionnaire was prepared for data collection. The questionnaire employed a 5-point Likert scale with “completely disagree” at 1 and “completely agree” at 5. A total of 327 questionnaires were returned. However, only 291 valid responders were used in the analysis. The Cronbach’s Alpha and the exploratory factor analysis were applied to test the scale reliability and discover the structure of the scales. Afterwards, we conducted the confirmatory factor analysis and the structural equation modeling to analyze collected data. The study shows that attitude is an important factor influencing the plastic bag use of consumers. Other factors that also lead to a decline in plastic bags are subjective norm and environmental concern. Meanwhile, the availability of substitutes does not affect consumers’ green behavior. Moreover, the major findings of the research suggest the relationship between the environmental protection tax and the use of plastic bags is not statistically significant. In other words, tax policy may fail to change the habit of using plastic bags in Vietnam.