COMMODITY TAX STRUCTURE AND INFORMAL ACTIVITY

Commodity tax structure affects the firm's choice between formality and informality. An increase in the specific tax rate, relative to an equivalent increase in ad valorem taxation, makes informality attractive to more firms. Formality becomes attractive at lower levels of profits under ad valorem taxation. For both the maximization of welfare subject to a revenue constraint and the unconstrained maximization of revenue, the optimal rate of specific taxation is zero.     

The most popular tax in Europe? Lessons from the Irish plastic bags levy

There have been occasional ad hoc efforts to influence consumer behaviour by the imposition of product taxes that reflect external costs imposed by such products that are not initially included in their price. In the spirit of this idea, in 2002 Ireland introduced a 15 Euro cent tax on plastic shopping bags, previously provided free of charge to customers at points of sale. The effect of the tax on the use of plastic bags in retail outlets has been dramatic—a reduction in use in the order of 90%, and an associated gain in the form of reduced littering and negative landscape effects. Costs of administration have been very low, amounting to about 3% of revenues, because it was possible to integrate reporting and collection into existing Value Added Tax reporting systems. Response from the main stakeholders: the public and the retail industry, has been overwhelmingly positive. Central to this acceptance has been a policy of extensive consultation with these stakeholders. The fact that a product tax can influence consumer behaviour significantly will be of interest to many policymakers in this area. This paper analyses the plastic bag levy success story and provides insights and general guidelines for other jurisdictions planning similar proposals.

Pollution control with imperfectly observable emissions

In this paper, a model of environmental regulation with imperfect monitoring of emissions is presented. The regulator can use linear output taxes and emission taxes to influence the pollution level of a risk-averse firm. In contrast to the perfect monitoring case, a tax mix will usually be optimal. The relative weight depends on the degree of risk aversion and monitoring imperfection, and on technological factors.     

On the Role of Green Taxes in Social Accounting

This paper addresses social accounting numerically in a dynamic generalequilibrium model. The main purposes are to study: (i) whether emissiontaxes based on static willingness to pay information can be used to improvethe welfare level, and; (ii) whether these taxes provide close enoughapproximations of the correct Pigouvian emission tax to be useful in thecontext of social accounting. The results indicate that, if environmentalquality is relatively linear with respect to pollution, the approximation ofthe Pigouvian emission tax will bring the economy close to the sociallyoptimal solution and, at the same time, provide a close approximation of thevalue of net investments in environmental capital.     

The Effects of Pollution Taxes on Urban Areas with an Endogenous Plant Location

This paper has integrated space into the effect of a direct pollution control on the pollution damage of heavily populated areas like CBD. This integration gives us some new insights into the effectiveness of a pollution tax as a pollution control device when the plant location of the firm is endogenized. It is shown that when the plant location is endogenous, as pollution taxes become higher, the firm moves its plant towards the CBD, causing higher pollution damage to the CBD residents, if the production function exhibits decreasing returns to scale.     

Competitiveness and Exemptions From Environmental Taxes in Europe

A number of European countries have introduced a variety of environmental taxes. A common characteristic of their implementation is the inclusion of exemptions and tax relief, in particular for (some sectors of) manufacturing industry. This paper analyses the pattern and motivation of exemptions as they have developed in Western European countries, making clear the difference between the nominal and effective tax rates once the exemptions have been taken into account. The principal motivation for exemptions relates to concern about competitiveness. While particular environmentally-intensive sectors may have some grounds for concern, even these might be able to achieve cost-effective environmental improvements, such that their competitive position is not over-disadvantaged, while for an economy structured like the UK's, an environmental tax plus rebate scheme, sometimes called an ecological tax reform, would be likely to yield benefits in terms of competitiveness. The exemptions usually run counter to the environmental economic logic of using environmental taxes to internalise social costs and give economic signals that are based on the full costs of production, and they are likely to increase the costs of achieving a given level of emission reduction. With little justification for them also on the grounds of competitiveness, it would therefore be undesirable on both economic and environmental grounds for them to remain a feature of the implementation of environmental taxes in the future.     

The impact of exogenous shocks on exits from the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany, 1953–2015

In Germany, exits from the Catholic and Protestant churches have fluctuated considerably over the last 60 years. Much of the observable variation in these exits can be explained by exogenous shocks such as unpopular encyclicals by the Pope, German reunification, sexual abuse cases and financial scandals.     

Optimal Tax Policy under Environmental Quality Competition

This paper studies the socially optimal emission and commodity tax policy when consumers are willing to pay a price-premium for environmentally friendlier variants of a commodity vertically differentiated in environmental quality. The first-best levels of quality can be obtained by a combination of a uniform ad valorem tax and an emission tax (or a subsidy for buying green products). The first-best emission tax is higher than the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality. Regardless of environmentally conscious consumers, if only one instrument is available, the second-best emission tax is equal to the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality. A uniform ad valorem tax increases welfare only if the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality is low enough.     

Adverse Selection and Pigou Taxes

It id assumed that firms have different technologies, and that an environment protection agency knows which technologies exist, but not which is used by which firms. Neither the emissions of individual firms nor their total emissions are observable. The output of each individual firm, however, can be monitored without cost. Based on this information tax schemes are constructed which induce firms to produce the socially efficient output quantities. Conditions about cost functions are derived which ensure the existence of tax schemes which yield first best solutions.     

Long-term industrial equilibrium in an ITQ managed fishery

This paper discusses long-term equilibrium in a fishery managed by individual transferable quotas. Rising prices or falling capital costs become capitalized in a higher value of quotas, implying higher capital costs for holding quotas. This may in fact reduce the size of each firm and lead to more firms existing in long-term equilibrium. Resource rent taxation by letting firms lose a certain share of their quota holdings each year is discussed and shown to be neutral.     

纳税人偷税行为原因分析与对策

对于不法纳税人的偷税问题 ,应从纳税人作为“经济人”、“社会人”、“道德人”三个角度出发 ,分析偷税行为产生的深层次原因 ,在此基础上采取诸如加强税务制度与队伍建设、提高惩罚成本、建立公平的税收体系、培养纳税人纳税道德、用税收信息化手段建立舆论监督机制等相应措施 ,借以对不法纳税人的偷税行为进行治理。     

论传统外部性理论解决环境代际外部性的失效

代际外部性问题主要是人类代际之间行为的相互影响,尤其是前代对后代、当代对后代的影响。在解决代际外部性上,施害者、受害者和政府生活在不同的时空中,新古典方法几乎就无能为力。产权的界定是在产权主体存在的前提下进行的,所以产权在代际进行界定是不可能实现的,所以通过科斯定理来消除代际的外部性也行不通。     

Joint Quantity/Quality Management of Groundwater

Economic literature on groundwater managementhas traditionally been split into two areas: there are papers that evaluate different schemes of dynamicaquifer management, considering that pumping costs vary with stock but ignoring water quality. On the other hand, there are papers that considercontamination problems caused by specificpollutants. This paper presents two alternative models for joint quantity-quality management, and it shows that existing models are in fact special cases of these. The framework isdynamic and considers both the stock of waterquantity and a stock measure of water quality. Optimal taxes are derived, and shown to be different from those in existing quantity-only or quality-only models. Implementationproblems are briefly discussed.     

The Consumer’s Micro-Micro Gasoline Buying Decision

A “micro-micro” consumer problem of gasoline purchases is examined using daily price data. Comparing the optimizing consumer with one who buys gasoline at random, the paper finds optimizers save about 4% of their annual gasoline bill. The paper also provides some evidence about the costs of non-optimal gasoline buying strategies.