Nonpoint Source Pollution Taxes and Excessive Tax Burden

If a regulator is unable to measure firms’ individual emissions, an ambient tax can be used to achieve the socially desired level of pollution. With this tax, each firm pays a unit tax on aggregate emissions. In order for the tax to be effective, firms must recognize that their decisions affect aggregate emissions. When firms behave strategically with respect to the tax-setting regulator, under plausible circumstances their tax burden is lower under an ambient tax, relative to the tax which charges firms on the basis of individual emissions. Firms may prefer the case where the regulator is unable to observe individual firm emissions, even if this asymmetric information causes the regulator to tax each firm on the basis of aggregate emissions.     

Research Issues in Nonpoint Pollution Control

Research on nonpoint pollution control instruments has focused primarily on incentives applied either to production inputs that affect nonpoint pollution, or to ambient pollution concentrations. Both approaches may in theory yield an efficient solution. However, input-based incentives will generally have to be second-best to make implementation practical. Design issues include which inputs to monitor and the rates to apply to them. The limited research indicates that second-best, input-based incentives can be effective in adjusting input use in environmentally desirable ways. Alternatively, ambient-based incentives have theoretical appeal because efficient policy design appears to be less complex than for input-based incentives. These incentives have no track record nor close analogues that demonstrate potential effectiveness, however. Research on how households and firms might react in response to ambient-based incentives is needed before these instruments can be seriously considered.     

Second-Best Road Taxes in Polycentric Networks with Distorted Labor Markets*

This paper examines the interaction of road taxes with spatially invariant labor taxation in a polycentric network. It derives analytical expressions for the network counterparts of the traditional double-dividend effects (i.e., Pigouvian, tax-interaction, and revenue-recycling effects), and computes them under different policy regimes. The analysis reveals a series of conditions under which a system of cordons around the major nodes of a network might be more efficient than marginal external cost pricing. With a high elasticity of labor supply and limited public transport coverage, it is shown that the Pigouvian tax rule might reduce welfare even when the generated revenue is used to finance labor tax cuts.     

Ambient Taxes Under m-Dimensional Choice Sets, Heterogeneous Expectations, and Risk-Aversion

We consider the design of ambient taxes forrisk-neutral and risk-averse polluters whenpolluters and the regulatory agency haveasymmetric information about environmentalrelationships and probabilities associatedwith random events. Unlike prior work, we showthat under these conditions, optimal ambienttaxes must be firm-specific, and accompaniedby additional incentives to influencepolluters' choices of abatement techniques.     

Environmental Quality,Medical Care Demand and Environmental Tax Interactions

Assuming that improvements in environmental quality lead to lower demand for medical care, it has been shown that general-equilibrium interactions with the tax-distorted labor market reduce the benefits from such improvements, and thus lower the second-best optimal environmental tax. This paper provides some insights on how the link between environmental quality, individual’s health capital, and the demand for medical care affects the analysis of pollution taxes. The paper develops structural conditions under which improvements in environmental quality decrease/increase the demand for medical care and discusses their implications for environmental tax interactions.      

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.     

Trade Policy and Natural Resource Use: The Case for a Quantitative Restriction

This paper presents a simple way for countries to reap the benefits of trade liberalization without exacerbating problems of overexploitation of natural resources. In the context of a Ricardo–Viner dynamic trade model, it is shown that when a binding quantitative restriction regulates extraction of a natural resource, free trade is optimal. This is true even if the quantitative restriction is not optimal. In contrast, in the presence of a suboptimal tax (including a zero tax in the special case of open access) on the use of natural resources, trade liberalization is not necessarily welfare improving.     

Absenteeism,Efficiency Wages,and Marginal Taxes

In this paper, I test the argument that increased taxes on earnings correspond to increased incentives to shirk, thus causing an increase in the rate of worker absenteeism. After fixed job effects are taken into account, panel register data on prime‐age Norwegian males who work full‐time show that a higher marginal net‐of‐earnings‐tax rate reduces the rate of absenteeism. When the net‐of‐tax rate is increased by 1.0 percent, absenteeism decreases by 0.3?0.5 percent. Injury‐related absences are less affected by tax changes than other absences. Absenteeism becomes more sensitive to tax changes as the occupational unemployment rate increases.     

环境税经济效应的扩展分析及其政策启示

本文从环境税的理论基础入手,回顾了环境税经济效应分析的几个有代表性的基本观点,认真分析了环境税经济效应传统分析中存在的局限性,并在此基础上将"经济结构优化效应"和"国际贸易受益效应"引入到环境税经济效应分析当中,大大拓宽了环境税经济效应分析的研究视角,最后在环境税经济效应创新性分析的基础上提出了相应的环境税政策启示。     

中国地方财税竞争与异质偏好劳动力的空间流动——以京津冀大都市区为例

文章通过对Hindriks、Rochet和Stole(2002)模型的拓展,将劳动力流动引入含有空间属性的区域财税竞争框架,研究异质性偏好的劳动力的空间流动决策,及其对地方税收竞争一般均衡的影响。文章解析了地方政府效用最大化的税收和支出组合条件、罗尔斯式政府效用与线性政府效用函数下均衡解的影响因素,以及均衡时要素流动性对地方政府效用和地方福利分配的政策影响。研究发现,劳动力流动与地方政府的政策集合、政府效用之间存在相互的决定和影响关系。在罗尔斯式的政府效用设定下,博弈均衡仅与技术工人的流动性有关,但地方再分配的程度与技术工人的流动性成反比。     

Market-based systems for reducing chemical use in agriculture in the United States

This study uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the U.S. economy to estimate the economic effects of agricultural fertilizer and pesticide input reductions on individual farm sectors, and on the economy as a whole. The costs of reducing agricultural chemicals using a market-based approach and a command-and-control approach are compared. The real cost to society of restrictng fertilizer and pesticide use by 20-percent across all uses is estimated to be $2.3 billion. A market-based approach that would provide incentives to reduce chemical use in the most cost efficient manner would be about 10-percent less costly.We would like to thank Greg Alward, Norman Bakka, Eldon Ball, Ken Hanson, Valerie Personick, and Mark Planning for supplying data.     

新能源汽车企业R&D投入与税收政策的关联关系

以2012—2014年中国17家新能源汽车上市公司的R&D投入和税收收入等数据为原始数据,将研发支出占营业收入比例作为参考序列,运用灰色关联度模型分析企业所得税、增值税和消费税3个主要税种与新能源汽车企业R&D投入的关联关系。结果表明:消费税与新能源汽车企业R&D投入的关联度最高,其次是所得税、增值税。最后,针对企业所得税、增值税和消费税分别提出了税收政策改革建议。     

Upstream and downstream pollution taxations in vertically related markets with imperfect competition

When two markets are vertically related, the government can control pollution at the upstream as well as the downstream market levels. This paper employs the stylized model of input price discrimination and compares the effectiveness of upstream and downstream pollution taxations. We consider the situation in which downstream firms have heterogeneous abatement technologies and an upstream monopolist performs input price discrimination against them. In order to mitigate pollution, the government imposes input tax on the intermediate inputs and emission tax on the pollutant. We show that the degree of input price discrimination decreases with a rise in the input tax and increases with a rise in the emission tax. We further examine the effect of a green tax reform in which the government changes the source of taxation from input tax to emission tax. We argue that although this green tax reform may reduce the tax revenue of the government, it will certainly increase social welfare.      

Spatial Heterogeneity and the Choice of Instruments to Control Nonpoint Pollution

Because it is difficult to monitor emissions and to implement differentialtaxes and standards, uniform taxes and standards on agricultural chemicaluse are often proposed and used to control nonpoint-source pollution. Thisarticle analyzes the relative efficiency of these uniform instruments in thepresence of spatial heterogeneity. We show that the relative slopes of themarginal pollution cost and marginal profit of chemical use are only one ofthe factors that affect the relative efficiency. Other factors includecorrelation between marginal pollution costs and marginal profits and theslope and variability of marginal profits. In addition, a uniform tax mayresult in some farmers not using the chemical, and a uniform standard mayhave no effect on low-input land. We show empirically that the presence ofcorner solutions can reverse a conventional finding of tax or standardsuperiority based on the relative-slop rule.     

农业污染综合防治对策研究——以江苏省泰州市为例

本研究在调研分析泰州市农业污染源种类、数量及污染程度基础上，剖析了农业污染的现状，应用系统工程原理．借鉴先进地区的治理经验及做法，从防治的管理机制、控制技术、法律法规、科学规划以及投入机制等五个方面，组装集成了农业污染综合防治的对策。     

Environmental capital flight and pollution tax

This paper analyzes the impacts of a production pollution tax on environmental capital flight and national product in a two-country static general equilibrium model with two-way foreign investment. It is assumed that the capital input in both countries is a composite good of domestic and imported capital. And pollution is assumed to originate in the production process. The productivity of capital in each country is negatively (or positively) related to the worldwide aggregate emissions.The analysis shows that when a domestic pollution tax is levied, domestic capital outflows increase and foreign capital inflows decrease for sufficiently high elasticities of substitution between labor (immobile input) and capital (mobile input) in both countries. Moreover, with negative transnational externalities, increases of a domestic pollution tax reduce domestic production and increase foreign production. The difficulty of substitution between immobile and mobile inputs hinders the optimal allocation of worldwide capital and national product. In this paper, the optimal pollution tax is based on global welfare maximization, not on global income maximization, taking into consideration the impact of income change on individual welfare. Therefore, an optimal pollution tax in the developing country should be lower for a given rate of pollution.     

Ambient-based pollution mechanisms: A comparison of homogeneous and heterogeneous groups of emitters

Over the last two decades, ambient-based tax mechanisms have been offered as a potential solution to the problem of nonpoint source water pollution. Previous theoretical analyses suggest that the performance of ambient-based tax mechanisms does not depend on firm characteristics, such as size, whilst policy discussions advocate that such mechanisms are best suited for regulating relatively homogeneous firms. Using controlled laboratory experiments, we provide empirical evidence that the distribution of firm sizes does have a significant impact on observed group decision making and further that heterogeneity has the potential to generate both some relatively desirable outcomes as well as some outcomes that are not attractive. These results suggest that richer theoretical models that capture important strategic interactions and social preferences are needed to better describe laboratory behavior and, by extension, behavior in potential policy settings.     

Consequences of Environmental Tax Reform for Unemployment and Welfare

We investigate the welfare effects of environmental tax reform, i.e. raising environmental taxes and using the proceeds to reduce distortionary taxes on labour. The framework of analysis is a small open economy with involuntary unemployment due to a rigid consumer wage. Environmental tax reform boosts not only environmental quality but also employment if substitution between labour and resources is easy, the production share of the fixed factor is large, and the initial tax rates on resources and profits are small. If the initial tax system is sub-optimal with a negligible tax on resources, profits rise as well.     

Social Economics and Risk Analysis

Risk analysis studies the likelihood and potential severity of harm created by a hazard. Research suggests that public “paranoia” about environmental risks is a product of mistrust, and that perceptions should carry weight in public policy. Application of social economic's “dual self” framework suggests that the willingness-to-pay approach to deciding whether risk reduction efforts are economical is flawed in its presumption against public values, its bias against the poor and the unborn, and its neglect of risk prevention. If comparative risk analysis can minimize rent-seeking and view environmental protection as an investment good, it may improve environmental policy.