Income based price subsidies and parallel imports

We present a policy game where a Rich country has a higher ability than a Poor country to commit to certain elements of health policy such as providing income related price subsidies and allowing parallel imports (PI). When allowing PI is not a choice for the Poor country, the Rich country allows PI and both countries provide a subsidy to their poorer buyers as the subgame perfect equilibrium policies. However, when the Poor is able to PI a different equilibrium may arise. We show that the ability of the Poor to allow PI might increase welfare in this country even if it is never implemented. We also prove that as the Poor country gets richer, it will not be in their best interest to sign an agreement with the Rich to commit to not allowing PI.     

Income based price subsidies and parallel imports

We present a policy game where a Rich country has a higher ability than a Poor country to commit to certain elements of health policy such as providing income related price subsidies and allowing parallel imports (PI). When allowing PI is not a choice for the Poor country, the Rich country allows PI and both countries provide a subsidy to their poorer buyers as the subgame perfect equilibrium policies. However, when the Poor is able to PI a different equilibrium may arise. We show that the ability of the Poor to allow PI might increase welfare in this country even if it is never implemented. We also prove that as the Poor country gets richer, it will not be in their best interest to sign an agreement with the Rich to commit to not allowing PI.     

Commodity taxation and imperfect competition : A note on the effects of entry

This paper looks at the effects of allowing the number of firms to vary in Seade's model of oligopoly and taxation. We show that the normative and positive consequences of a specific commodity tax are affected by entry in significant ways.     

Risk-taking and taxation

Conclusions This survey has considered the effects of taxation on risk-taking from both a partial and a general equilibrium viewpoint. The most relevant results to emerge at a very general level are that in the former taxation will typically increase risk-taking, while in the latter it is typically better to tax risky industries more heavily than safe; both results are contrary to conventional views.While the work surveyed shows that substantial progress has been made on this question it also shows that there remains much to be done. This seems to fall into three categories. Firstly, the investigation by variational methods of the properties of an optimal (not necessary linear) tax function in a simple model; secondly, the combination of these ideas on the optimal taxation of risky property income with those in the taxation of labor income, and also of expenditures; and finally, the incorporation of risk into all forms of optimal taxation model, not only those explicitly concerned with risky assets. These however are far from simple problems.This paper was presented at the International Economic Association Workshop in Economic Theory, Bergen 1971; I should like to thank the IEA for a stimulating month, and participants for comments, particularly J. A. Mirrlees for suggesting the analysis on page 207f. I am also grateful to A.B.Atkinson for comments.     

Quantitative restrictions and Indian imports

Many governments in LDCs tend 3o rely heavily on import control for achieving adjustments in the balance of payments. The empirical analysis of imports of these countries has failed to address the issue of quantitative restrictions satisfactorily. In this paper, a set of disaggregated import demand equations are specified which attempt to capture the government's decision regarding quota restrictions. The model postulates that the overall level of imports is determined by expected foreign exchange availability while the composition of imports (once the level has been decided) is based on political and economic priorities and on relative prices.     

Externalities and optimal taxation

This paper reexamines the optimal tax design problem (income and commodities) in the presence of externalities. The nature of the second–best, and the choice of the tax instruments, are motivated by the informational structure in the economy. The main results are: (i) environmental levies (linear or nonlinear) differ in formula from Pigouvian taxes by the expressions for the optimal tax on private goods; (ii) externalities do not affect commodity tax formulas (linear and nonlinear) for private goods; (iii) externalities do not affect the income tax structure if commodity taxes are nonlinear and affect it if commodity taxes are linear; and (iv) a general income tax plus strictly Pigouvian taxes are sufficient for efficient taxation if individuals of different types have identical marginal rates of substitution (at any given consumption bundle).     

Technology transfer through imports

Abstract .  We study international technology transfer through R&D spillovers in sixteen countries' manufacturing industries since the early 1970s. The analysis shows that the productivity impact of international technology transfer often exceeds that of domestic technological change, more so in high-technology industries. Moreover, technology transfer is found to be strongly varying across country-pairs and tends to decline in geographic distance, pointing to goods trade as the transfer channel. We directly evaluate this hypothesis, and results suggest that trade is crucial for technology transfer from Germany, France, and the UK, while for the US, Japan, and Canada non-trade channels are more important.     

Copyright protection and hardware taxation

This paper investigates the recently practiced method of taxing hardware and transferring the proceeds to software makers, or artists in general. We characterize the conditions under which the policy of compensating copyright owners for infringements on their intellectual property using hardware taxation is inefficient.     

Self-selection and Pareto efficient taxation

This paper analyses the set of Pareto efficient tax structures. The formulation of the problem as one of self-selection not only shows more clearly the similarity between this problem and a number of other problems (such as the optimal pricing of a monopolist) which have recently been the subject of extensive research, but also allows the derivation of a number of new results. We establish (i) under fairly weak conditions, randomization of tax structures is desirable; (ii) if different individuals are not perfect substitutes for one another in production, then the general equilibrium effects—until now largely ignored in the literature—of changes in the tax structure may be dominant in determining the optimal tax structure; in particular if the relative wage of high ability and low ability individuals depends on the relative supplies of labor, the optimal tax structure entails a negative marginal tax rate on the high ability individuals, and a positive marginal tax rate on the low ability individuals (the marnitude of which depends on the elasticity of substitution); (iii) if individuals differ in their preferences, Pareto efficient taxation may entail negative marginal tax rates for high incomes; while (iv) if wage income is stochastic, the marginal tax rate at the upper end may be 100%.Our analysis thus makes clear that the main qualitative properties of the optimal tax structure to which earlier studies called attention are not robust to these attempts to make the theory more realistic.     

Unemployment insurance and redistributive taxation

This paper studies the simultaneous determination of the socially optimal levels of unemployment insurance, income taxation and experience rating. It argues that there is a normative justification for state unemployment insurance. When the government wishes to use redistributive taxes, but cannot enforce lump-sum transfers, it is not socially optimal for there to be full experience rating of unemployment insurance schemes: one distortion should be used to off-set another. The state must then intervene in the provision of insurance for those without jobs.     

Earmarked taxation and political competition

Although tax earmarking constitutes a voluntary constraint for government's policymaking, it is widely used in the real world. This paper investigates the electoral dimension of earmarking in a model of political competition with ideological parties. Its main contribution is to derive new insights on the relationship between earmarking and parties' probability of winning the elections. We find that the electoral pressure may favor the existence of tax-earmarking equilibria, but that it sometimes creates a tendency against earmarked taxation even when, as shown by Brett and Keen (2000) [Brett, C., Keen, M., 2000. Political uncertainty and the earmarking of environmental taxes. Journal of Public Econonomics 75, 315–340], incumbent governments have strong incentives to use earmarking rules to constrain future policymakers.     

Markov-perfect optimal taxation

In this paper we study optimal taxation in a dynamic game played by a sequence of governments and the private sector. We focus on the Markov-perfect equilibrium of this game under two different assumptions on the extent of government's intra-period commitment, which in turn define two within-period timings of actions. Our results show that the extent of government's intra-period commitment has important quantitative implications for policies, welfare, and macroeconomic variables, and consequently that it must be explicitly stated as one of the givens of the economy, alongside preferences, markets and technology. We see this as an important result, since most of the previous literature on Markovian optimal taxation has assumed, either interchangeably or unnoticeably, different degrees of government's intra-period commitment.     

Generalized cash-flow taxation

We show the unique form that must be taken by a tax system based entirely on realization accounting to implement a uniform capital income tax, or, equivalently, a uniform wealth tax. This system combines elements of an accrual based capital income tax and a traditional cash-flow tax, having many of the attributes of the latter while still imposing a tax burden on marginal capital income. Like the traditional cash-flow tax, this system may be integrated with a tax on labor income. We also show how such a tax can be supplemented with an optional accounting for a segregated subset of actively traded securities, subjected separately to mark-to-market taxation at the uniform capital income tax rate, to permit a fully graduated tax system applicable to labor income.     

Income averaging and progressive taxation

This paper examines a simple scheme for the taxation of income on the basis of an average of income over three years, and where no tax is paid in arrears. It is shown that individuals have greater liquidity than under a conventional system. Longitudinal data on incomes of several cohorts of males in the U.K. are used to estimate the possible effects on total revenue. The effect on inequality is also briefly examined.     

Green taxation and individual responsibility

The current article aims at studying the effects of taxation on environmental quality, in an economy where its agents are responsible. Individual responsibility towards nature is modelized by the voluntary effort to which the households have agreed insofar as the improvement of environmental quality is concerned. It is an original way to show that the individuals may feel committed towards the environment and assume obligations towards it as well as towards environmental public policy. Given that, in our model, such effort is taken from one's allocated time for leisure, its opportunity cost is that of the sacrificed time for leisure, and is therefore equal to the individual's wage. We shall highlight that State intervention through the introduction of a (green) tax always crowds out individual responsibility. However, the intensity of this crowding-out depends on the performance of the State. Moreover, State intervention could, depending on the amount of crowding-out, reduce the overall quality of the environment. In a general equilibrium setting, we show that the crowding-out effect is not systematic. This is because there will then be an interaction between effort (or work time) and the cost of that effort (linked to the individual's wage, and therefore to production and finally to work/effort). In this article, we shall discuss the conditions under which public policy crowds out individual responsibility within this context.     

Efficient commodity taxation

Necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of commodity taxes to be Pareto efficient are derived. Unlike the literature on optimal taxation these conditions are derived without reference to a social welfare function. One of the necessary conditions derived by a revealed preference argument is particularly useful. It is shown to yield the Ramsey rule for single-person economies and some alternative rules for many-person economies. These rules have the desirable feature that they depend only upon the properties of the aggregate household demand functions and aggregate technology.