国外环境税问题研究进展

对国外学者关于环境税收问题研究的新成果进行综述。诠释最优环境税定义及探寻不同条件假设下最优环境税率的确定,从一般均衡的视角考察环境质量对劳动供给决策的影响,探讨税收相互作用的效应和分析学者重点研究的双重红利及其存在条件。最后根据发达国家环境税政策运行的经验,分析将环境税作为环境管制措施引入发展中国家的可行性。     

A Simple General Test for Tax Bias

A bstract .   The paper infers the biasing effects of taxes from their differential effects on the present values of rival uses for given tracts of land. After-tax wage rates, interest rates, and commodity prices are exogenous, hence not affected by taxes, which are therefore all shifted to land rents and values. The effects are differential among rival uses, hence change their ranking in the eyes of the landowner-manager. Most taxes downgrade the highest use into a lower use, inducing quantum leaps away from higher and better uses into lower and worse uses. The paper uses forestry as an allegory for all land uses. It compares yield taxes, property taxes, income taxes, and site value taxes. It finds that a change from the first three to the site value tax would induce quantum leaps from lower to higher uses of land.     

对我国能源税费体制改革的新思考

能源环境问题是影响当今经济社会可持续发展的核心问题之一.我国相对完善的能源税费体制尚未形成,资源税费改革滞后,对能源环境税费征收重视不足,节能环保激励效应不明显,使得能源税费对能源产业调控作用有限,进而导致长期以来能源价格未能全面反映能源的全部价值.因此,根据“十二五”规划纲要提出的改革目标,我国能源税费制度改革应依据维护生态平衡、系统化设计、能源结构的优化与多样化、公平分配环境责任、提高能源效率等基本原则,从建立综合税收调控体系、择机开征碳税、全面推进资源税费改革、开征能源环境税、健全能源环保税收优惠措施五个方面入手加快推进.     

Local public goods in an equilibrium : How pecuniarv externalities matter

We study two Nash equilibria among a finite number of jurisdictions which maximize property values by providing public goods. In the first Nash equilibrium, the strategies are LPGs, financed by land taxes. We give conditions under which LPGs will be underprovided and show how this result is linked to price effects caused outside the jurisdiction. In the second Nash equilibrium, the strategies are LPGs and head taxes, with the budget balanced by land taxes. Jurisdiction-specific head taxes have incentive effects, whereas land taxes do not. In this case LPGs will be provided efficiently for the resident population.     

Causality between taxes and expenditures: Evidence from Latin American countries

The paper applies the techniques of cointegration and Hsiao’s version of the Granger causality method to examine the causality between taxes and expenditures for eight Latin American countries. The findings of bidirectional causality between taxes and expenditures in Chile, Panama, Brazil, and Peru indicate that taxes and expenditures are jointly determined. This study, however, detects causality running one way from taxes to expenditures in Columbia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Paraguay. Taken together, this study strongly rejects the spend-and-tax hypothesis. (JEL C320, E620)     

房产税对房产市场影响的实证研究——上海模式和重庆模式的比较

文章首先运用HP滤波的方式分析了沪渝两地房产税对新房和二手房在价格和成交量上的影响,发现上海房地产市场对房产税的的征收反应更为理性,影响效果更好,但两地区新房和二手房市场的反映都存在差异;此外,利用房价对数模型,发现房产税都能有效的影响两地的房价,但由于影响两地房价的因素有很大的差异,效率并不一样,上海地区房产税每增加1%,房价将下降0.553%,重庆地区房产税每增加1%,房价将下降0.041%。因此国家需区别对待新房和二手房市场,并且因地制宜,推广不同的房产税模式。     

Land Prices and Tax Policy: A Study of Fiscal Impacts

A bstract . Various tax measures are in use in efforts to control the level of land prices and to moderate changes in them. These are the site value, vacant land, increment value and transfer taxes. Analysis indicates that sufficiently heavy site value taxes can help stem the rise in land prices and that relatively heavy vacant land taxes can be used to encourage the development of certain urban land. Both instruments may bring forward the time of development. Both are perhaps the best tax tools for controlling speculation. Significant problems seem likely to attend the use of land value increment and transfer taxes applied at high rates. Non-tax alternative or complementary measures are also analyzed.     

The effect of business taxation on the location of industry

A theoretical and econometric model is specified which permits the estimation of the effect of local taxes on economic activity in a locality. A location elasticity of ?0.35 is found for manufacturing activity in New York City with respect to business taxes, while no significant elasticity is found for nonmanufacturing activity. The deadweight losses and revenue effects of the tax are analyzed and calculated, as are the optimal second-best taxes for a locality.     

EDITORIAL: TAX REFORM AND SIMPLIFICATION

Major tax reform to simplify the UK tax system is possible. Merging income taxes, social security taxes and corporation tax into only a single flat-rate of tax on all incomes would be a radical start. Avoiding taxes on income and expenditure which are 'too high' requires major reductions in government spending, mainly on the welfare state. Given the political will, over a period of years we really can hugely improve the UK tax system.     

The option value of tax delinquency: Theory

How taxes are enforced matters. Current enforcement of real property taxes does not consider the option value of delinquency: the ultimate penalty is confiscation of property sometime in the future, but the value of the property to be confiscated is not known with certainty. If redemption fees are sufficiently small, it can be optimal to wait and see what the size of the penalty will be before paying taxes. We show how this can lead to excessive abandonment, and examine proposals for reform.     

The Built‐in Flexibility of Income and Consumption Taxes

This paper reviews, and synthesises within a uniform framework, a number of analytical results on the built‐in flexibility of taxation. Established results for income taxes are reviewed and integrated with recent results for consumption taxes. These help to provide a better understanding of the determinants of the revenue responsiveness properties of different taxes. They also provide convenient expressions for the calculation of tax revenue elasticities in practice. It is shown that the magnitude of revenue elasticities can be expected to differ substantially for alternative taxes, for different forms of the same tax, and for the same tax over time as incomes change relative to tax thresholds and as consumption patterns change. These results are especially relevant for the many industrialised countries which have undertaken major fiscal reforms in recent years with, often unintended, consequences for revenue elasticities.     

Carbon taxes and the double dividend hypothesis in a recursive-dynamic CGE model for Spain

A carbon tax is potentially a policy that can reduce CO₂ emissions and mitigate climate risks, at lowest economy-wide costs. We develop a dynamic CGE model for Spain to assess the economic and environmental effects of a carbon tax, and test the double dividend (DD) hypothesis. We simulate the impact of three carbon taxes: €10, €20 and €30 per ton of CO₂. For each tax, four ‘revenue recycling’ scenarios are examined: a reduction of taxes on capital, on labor, on value-added tax, and a scenario in which revenues are not recycled. We find a DD for taxes of €10/ton and lower, within five to seven years of implementation. We estimate an annual CO₂ emissions reduction of around 10% with this tax. Under some circumstances, the DD can be achieved for a tax of €20/ton. In any case, recycling revenues to cut pre-existing taxes reduces costs of imposing carbon taxes.     

TAXES AND SPECULATIVE BEHAVIOR IN LAND AND REAL ESTATE MARKETS

Land and real estate speculation are common in many countries, and attempts to control them vary in both style and scope. This paper addresses the effectiveness of several approaches to discouraging land and real estate speculation, concluding that land holding taxes, short term gains taxes, and transaction taxes have all proven to be relatively unsuccessful methods of control. The paper discusses housing price booms and busts in the United States, and describes attempts to control speculation, notably the Vermont Land Gains Tax, the Taiwan Land Value Increment Tax, and the Real Property Gains Tax of Japan.     

基于DFSR模型房地产税收政策对房价影响研究——以上海市为例

以上海市为研究区域,构建包含驱动力、状态、响应指标的DFSR模型来分析房地产税收政策对房价响应的评价体系,其中利用主成份分析法确定驱动力指标综合得分,再根据量化的各项指标,明确房地产税收政策在房价影响中的地位。研究结果表明,房地产税收政策的调整呈明显的周期性变化,在政策调控力度强的情况下,政策对房价的影响是非常明显的。同时房地产税收政策调控具有时滞性,政策的调控力度与房价的变化并不完全同步。最后提出相应的改革措施,为优化房地产税收政策提供建议与参考。     

Why truck distance taxes are contagious and drive fuel taxes to the bottom

This paper analyzes the way in which countries with international and local truck traffic decide to switch from a simple fuel tax system to a dual system of fuel and distance charge taxes. We show what drives a country to switch and how this affects the level of fuel taxes as well as incentives for other countries to also adopt the dual system. The model is partially able to explain the gradual extension of kilometer charging for trucks in Europe. The model also shows that, in the absence of diesel cars, the gradual introduction of kilometer charges will make fuel taxation for trucks virtually disappear and will lead to a system where truck use is (1) taxed mainly based on distance, (2) is taxed too heavily, and (3) where highest distance taxes are expected in transit countries with a strong market position. When the fuel tax must in addition serve as an externality tax for diesel cars, the introduction of distance charges for trucks will give rise to diesel taxes that are lower than the external cost of diesel cars. For trucks, this leads to a sum of diesel taxes and distance charges that are higher than the external cost of trucks.     

Distortionary Taxation and Labour Market Performance

Quarterly estimates of consumption, capital and labour tax rates are provided for six major OECD countries. We then use the 'stylized facts' methodology to evaluate the strength, sign and phase of cyclical comovements between tax rates and labour market variables. Labour taxes distort labour market de-cisions and help explain why the unemployment rate is so high in continental Europe. However, labour taxes cannot be the only determinant of diverging unemployment rates since the labour force is also reduced by higher taxes. Finally, we offer some preliminary structural evidence showing employment growth in particular to be negatively related to the taxation of labour.     

Optimal fiscal policy under learning

This paper characterizes optimal fiscal policy when agents learn about future taxation. A benevolent and fully rational government chooses taxes on labor income and state-contingent bonds to finance public spending, considering that private agents form their expectations through a learning algorithm. Facing a trade-off between distortionary taxes and distorted expectations, the Ramsey planner chooses the policy that minimizes the total cost of distortions. The analysis produces two main results. First, the government will use fiscal variables to manipulate expectations, reducing taxes and issuing debt at times of pessimism and doing the opposite at times of optimism. This speeds up learning. Second, the expectation-dependent fiscal plan is also history-dependent, and it prescribes taxes that are not as smooth and more persistent than under rational expectations. These findings are robust to alternative learning algorithms.     

Are PILOTs property taxes for nonprofits?

Nonprofit charitable organizations are exempt from most taxes, including local property taxes, but U.S. cities and towns increasingly request that nonprofits make payments in lieu of taxes (known as PILOTs). Strictly speaking, PILOTs are voluntary, though nonprofits may feel pressure to make them, particularly in high-tax communities. Evidence from Massachusetts indicates that PILOT rates, measured as ratios of payments to the value of local tax-exempt property, are higher in towns with higher property tax rates: a one percentage point higher property tax rate is associated with a 0.2 percentage point higher PILOT rate. PILOTs appear to discourage nonprofit activity: a one percentage point higher PILOT rate is associated with 0.8% lower real property ownership by local nonprofits, 0.2% lower total assets, and 0.2% lower revenues of local nonprofits. These patterns are consistent with voluntary PILOTs acting in a manner similar to low-rate, compulsory real estate taxes.     

Progressive Taxes and the Labour Market: Is the Trade–off Between Equality and Efficiency Inevitable?

Does an income tax harm economic efficiency more the more progressive it is? Public economics provides a strong case for a definite ‘yes’. But at least three forces may pull in the other direction. First, low–wage workers may on average have more elastic labour supply schedules than high–wage workers, in which case progressive taxes contribute to a more efficient allocation of the total tax burden. Second, in non–competitive labour markets, progressive taxes may encourage wage moderation, and hence reduce the equilibrium level of unemployment. And third, if wage setters have egalitarian objectives, progressive taxes may reduce the need for redistribution in pre–tax wages, and hence increase the demand for low–skilled workers. This paper surveys the theoretical, as well as the empirical literature about labour supply, taxes and wage setting. We conclude that in a second best world, the trade–off between equality and efficiency is not always inevitable.     

减税降费背景下小微企业财务管理研究

在减税降费背景之下,企业要想谋求长远发展,需要严格地遵守国家税务征收的相关政策,做好纳税申报以及税款缴纳。论文主要分析了减税降费政策的实施对小微企业的影响,阐述了减税降费背景下小微企业财务管理现存的问题,最后提出了有效的财务管理路径,为相关财务人员提供一定的理论参考。