Socio-Economic equity and justice in the electric mobility transition: Policy interventions and distributional impacts

¹ Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Accra Technical University, Accra, Ghana
² Department of Theoretical and Applied Biology, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana
³ Department of Data Science and Analytics, Thrive Africa, Accra, Ghana

^* Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Abstract

Electric vehicle (EV) subsidy regimes across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies rarely account for distributional equity, yet the allocation of policy benefits directly affects the fairness of the mobility transition. This study evaluates three incentive instruments: flat-rate purchase subsidies, means-tested incentives, and the deployment of public charging infrastructure. Using a two-way fixed-effects panel regression across 25 OECD countries from 2015 to 2022, adoption rates are disaggregated into five household income quintiles using expenditure survey microdata. Flat-rate subsidies are strongly regressive. A USD 1,000 increase raises adoption by 1.74 percentage points among the highest-income quintile, compared with only 0.31 percentage points among the lowest. Means-tested incentives fully reverse this gradient. Charging infrastructure targeted at low-income areas yields adoption effects nearly four times greater than equivalent investment in affluent zones. Deploying both instruments jointly produces superadditive gains among lower-income households. The study provides the most comprehensive cross-national analysis of incentive-to-adoption elasticities by income group to date. It establishes a previously unquantified synergy between progressive subsidies and spatially targeted infrastructure, and makes the case for redesigning flat subsidies as means-tested instruments alongside dedicated support for used EV markets.