Sustainable development, justice and the Atkinson index: Measuring the distributional effects of the German energy transition

•The Brundtland Commission defines the necessity of justice for sustainable development.•Rawls developed the ethical background for the distribution analysis.•The epsilon parameter of the Atkinson index can take up these ideas and society’s view of justice.•Our distribution analysis contributes to the social debate about social distributional justice.•The analysis elucidates the distributional consequences of increasing energy prices. The transformation of the energy sector in Germany is associated with a considerable increase in prices, especially for electricity, which places different burdens on households depending on income. This conflicts with the idea of a fair distribution of burdens arising from the transformation of the energy sector and might endanger the acceptance of this transformation. For methodological reasons, we do not apply the GINI index in our analysis, instead we use the Atkinson index for the first time in the energy sector to quantitatively measure the distribution of energy consumption. Furthermore, we place the epsilon parameter of this index in the context of the discussion on sustainable development and justice. The epsilon parameter gives society the opportunity to make explicit what it implicitly considers to be “just” and this concept can, if necessary, be corrected by a different choice of epsilon. If society chooses a higher epsilon value because it makes higher demands on a “just” distribution of burdens and costs then the index can identify a gap between the normative goal and societal reality. This permits the authorities to implement economic policy measures to close this gap. From our point of view, the Atkinson index is an instrument that can be used to operationalize Rawls’ theory of justice against the background of the social theory of sustainable development. For our analysis, we used the example of the burdens of transforming the energy sector in Germany. Our data basis is the German Household Expenditure Survey (EVS).