两税合并对引进外资的影响及对策分析

"两税"并存,让外资企业享受"超国民待遇",吸引外商投资,作为特定历史条件下的权宜之计,无可厚非。但随着经济的发展、时代的变迁,更需要有一个公平、公正的市场竞争与投资环境。基于自身的利益,围绕新税制的设计,各方曾有过激烈的博弈。本文就博弈的解数之一,即统一税制后是否会对引进外资产生严重的影响及如何应对问题,发表个人的浅见。     

Linear Pigovian taxes and the optimal size of a polluting industry

Confusion surrounding the appropriateness of long-run considerations in effluent regulation has arisen in the literature and recently carried over into textbooks. We use a factor input model under oligopsony to show that, when firms can influence the level of marginal damages, a linear pollution tax does not satisfy the long-run entry-exit condition. Previous results to the contrary are shown to depend on restrictive assumptions. Efficient policy design requires a lump-sum refund or any one of various non-linear pricing schemes. JEL Classification: Q2, L1
Il y a beaucoup de confusion dans les débats qui entourent la réglementation des effluents, et son caractère plus ou moins appropriéà long terme, tant dans la littérature spécialisée que dans les manuels. Les auteurs tentent d'éliminer cette confusion en analysant les émissions à l'aide d'un modèle standard de demande d'intrant. Quand les entreprises peuvent influencer la valeur présente des dommages marginaux, un impôt linéaire sur la pollution n'entraîne pas nécessairement les décisions appropriées d'entrée et de sortie. On peut corriger le problème à l'aide d'un remboursement forfaitaire ou de l'une ou l'autre des formes de tarification non-linéaire.     

Optimal pollution taxation in a Cournot duopoly

It is well known that the optimal pollution tax in a competitive industry is equal to the marginal damage inflicted by the pollution. It has also been shown that the optimal pollution tax on a monopoly is less than the marginal damage. In this paper, I derive the optimal pollution tax for a Cournot duopoly. If firms have different production costs, the optimal tax rate may exceed the marginal damage. This is so because the tax may be an effective instrument for allocating production from the less to the more efficient firm. It is also shown that, if one firm has a positive most preferred pollution tax, the sum of consumer and producer surpluses will be declining in the tax at this level.     

Environmental performance and returns to pollution abatement in China

Because of China's extremely rapid economic growth, the scale and seriousness of environmental problems is no longer in doubt. Whether pollution abatement technologies are utilized more efficiently is crucial in the analysis of environmental management in China. This study analyzes how the performance of environmental management has changed over time using province level data for 1992-2003. Mixed results for environmental performance are shown using nonparametric estimation technique. We find that environmental performance index, abatement effort, and increasing returns to pollution abatement play important roles in determining the pollution level over the period of the study.     

Harmonization of carbon taxes in international climate agreements

The use of some kind of carbon tax is often proposed as part of an international climate policy. One possibility could be an international climate agreement requiring a harmonization of domestic carbon taxes. It is shown that there are several practical difficulties with such an agreement, and that it therefore is unlikely that CO₂ emissions will be allocated efficiently between countries with this type of agreement. Alternative types of agreements include an international carbon tax, in which the governments of the participating countries pay a tax, in proportion to their CO₂ emissions, to an international agency. A very similar arrangement would be to introduce a system of emission permits which are internationally tradeable between governments. Under quite general conditions, agreements of these two types can be designed so that they are both efficient and satisfy whatever distributional objectives one might have. Under both of these systems, the choice of domestic policies could be left to the individual countries. A domestic carbon tax is an obvious policy response from a country participating in an agreement of this type.Significant parts of the paper are based on research at CICERO (Center for International Climate and Energy Research, Oslo) and the Centre for Research in Economics and Business Administration (SNF), Oslo. The paper draws heavily on a related paper (Hoel, 1992a) which was prepared for Workshop on Fee and Charge Systems for Reducing Greenhouse Gases, OECD, Paris, November 5–6, 1991. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for useful comments on an earlier version of the paper.     

Uncertainty over future environmental taxes

Besides static efficiency properties, environmental policies should be evaluated in terms of their longer-run impacts on investment and technological change to reduce pollution and degradation of natural resources. Using a stochastic dynamic programming approach, this paper analyzes how uncertainty about a future environmental tax on a polluting input alters investment in resource conservation and how such investment affects future demand for the polluting input. The impact on investment depends crucially on price elasticities of demand and on the manner in which investment shifts and rotates the demand schedule for the polluting input in the future. The expectation of a higher tax does not necessarily create stronger incentives for investment in resource conservation. More uncertainty about future policies does encourage investment if it makes a firm more responsive to future price changes and discourages investment if it makes a firm less responsive to price changes.     

Environmental innovation and the cost of pollution abatement revisited

It is widely assumed in the literature that environmental innovation reduces the marginal cost of pollution abatement. In this paper we show that this is not necessarily the case and we provide some unexpected outcomes.     

Distorting taxes and interest on reserves

Few governments in developed economies currently pay interest on reserves. However, Goodfriend (2001) [Goodfriend, M., 2001. Interest on reserves and monetary policy, mimeo, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond] concludes that it is a useful tool to implement monetary policy. In a monetary growth model with a financial intermediary and a firm who needs to borrow to pay wages, it is shown that paying interest on reserves financed by a labor tax reduces welfare.     

Excise taxes,over-shifting,cross-elasticity,and tax revenue

This article examines cross-elasticity effects in excise taxation for markets characterized by monopolistic competition and over-shifting. Extending the constant elasticity demand model to consider cross-elasticity leads to notably different results regarding tax revenue maximization. With nonzero but weak cross-elasticity effects relative to the price elasticity, we derive a higher optimal tax-price ratio compared to prior research. With strong cross-elasticity, revenue can continually be increased by raising the excise tax. Overall, the study offers government greater incentive to use excise taxes to obtain revenue.     

On the efficiency of indirect taxes in differentiated oligopolies with asymmetric costs

This paper shows that unit taxation can be welfare superior to ad valorem taxation in asymmetric and differentiated oligopolies if the goods are sufficiently differentiated, the cost variance is sufficiently large and the ad valorem tax rate is sufficiently high. Moreover, this result holds under either Cournot competition or Bertrand competition.      

Living to save taxes

Does taxation affect the timing of death? This is an interesting example of how behavior might be affected by economic incentives. We study how two changes in Swedish inheritance taxation 2004–2005 have affected daily all-cause mortality. Our main result is that mortality decreased by 17% the day before the expected tax repeals began.     

Optimum management and environmental protection in the aquaculture industry

The sustainability of the aquaculture industry has recently been the object of social and scientific debate, due to the contamination caused by the culture to the surrounding environment. As a contribution to the debate, this paper analyses the effect of adopting a Pigovian tax to internalise the environmental costs on the optimal management of farms. To do so, we make use of dynamic stochastic models of fish growth and contamination diffusion. Farms can also implement some measures to abate pollution, which are divided into two types: those applied continuously (“managerial” measures) and those once in a culture cycle (“structural” measures). The results reveal that the tax imposition lowers the optimum size in the farm. The type of abatement strategy plays a central role in the determination of the optimum harvest size. A need for caution in internalisation policies is emphasized, as negative consequences could arise in certain cases, putting the farms' survival at risk.     

Withholding taxes or information exchange: the taxation of international interest flows

This paper considers withholding taxes and information exchange as alternative means to tax international interest income. For each regime, we consider the maximum level of taxation of foreign-source income that can be sustained as the equilibrium of a repeated game. The best regime is the one that brings the level of taxation in the repeated game closest to the cooperative level of interest taxation. Sustainable levels of taxation in either regime depend on the importance of bank profits and on the marginal cost of public funds, among other things. Simulations with the model illustrate the choice between withholding taxes and information exchange. An explicit possibility is the emergence of a mixed regime, with one country imposing a withholding tax and the other country providing information. The basic model is extended to allow for size differences between the two countries and to incorporate a third, outside country.     

Environmental Policy with Endogenous Technology from a Game Theoretic Perspective: The Case of the US Pulp and Paper Industry

The merits of different types of regulatory tools in eliminating pollution and at the same time inducing innovation have long been an interest of researchers in both environmental economics and industrial organization. Although there is a substantial theoretical literature investigating the potential for various environmental policies to attain these dual goals, this is a challenging empirical problem because every industry has its own inherent characteristics that play an important role in determining the performance of different regulatory tools. The majority of the work to date focuses on pollution abatement while leaving pollution prevention understudied. In most of the literature firms are also assumed to be symmetric. Asymmetries among firms add another degree and level of complexity to their strategic interactions, and affect the performance of different regulatory tools. This paper investigates the performance of two alternative regulatory tools, an emissions performance standard and an emissions tax, in reducing pollution and inducing pollution prevention and abatement R&D in the US pulp and paper industry. We construct a model representing the industry in an asymmetric Cournot duopoly framework, calibrate the model to disaggregated industry data, and run scenarios to replicate the behavior of the firms in an imperfectly competitive output market. Our results suggest that pollution prevention R&D can respond quite differently than abatement R&D to different policy instruments. The results indicate that R&D spillovers among firms play crucial role in technology development and strategies of the firms. Our results also suggest that strategic interactions between firms in an imperfectly competitive industry can have significant impacts of the levels of both types of R&D.      

Asymmetric information, signaling and environmental taxes in oligopoly

This paper examines the effects of signaling on environmental taxation in a two-period oligopoly model in which each firm privately knows whether its technology is clean or dirty, while third parties (the rival firms and the regulator) have only a subjective perception about this fact. Consequently, there are both horizontal and vertical asymmetric information, and each firm can strategically manipulate both, the competitor's and the regulator's priors. In this context, we find that each firm wishes to be perceived as a technologically clean firm in period 2 whenever the regulator's ecological conscience is sufficiently high. We also show that taxes under symmetric information are always positive, but under asymmetric information and signaling they may be negative (subsidies) and lower or greater than in the symmetric information case, depending on the ecological conscience of the regulator and the probability of firms being dirty. Finally, taxes are below environmental marginal damage, both under symmetric and asymmetric information, and signaling reinforces such under-taxation.     

Recycling of carbon/energy taxes and the labor market

This paper provides a quantitative assessmet of a cost shift from labor to energy by means of a carbon/energy tax. The analysis utilizes a general equilibrium model for the European Community, placing the emphasis on the modeling of labor supply. The paper highlights the importance of the feedback from an induced increase in labor demand to wage formation. It shows that the goals of CO₂ reduction and improved employment are complementary, provided the reduction in labor costs financed by the carbon/energy tax is not offset by increased wage claims. Under this condition, reduced CO₂ is consistent with an increase in GDP.     

Foreign direct investment in a world of multiple taxes

Governments impose multiple taxes on foreign investors, though studies of the effect of tax policy on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI) focus almost exclusively on corporate income taxes. This paper examines the impact of indirect (non-income) taxes on FDI by American multinational firms, using affiliate-level data that permit the introduction of controls for parent companies and affiliate industries. Indirect tax burdens significantly exceed the foreign income tax obligations of foreign affiliates of American companies. Estimates imply that 10% higher local indirect tax rates are associated with 7.1% lower affiliate assets, which is similar to the effect of 10% higher income tax rates. Affiliate output falls by 2.9% as indirect taxes rise by 10%, while higher income taxes have more modest output effects. High corporate income tax rates depress capital/labor ratios and profit rates of foreign affiliates, whereas high indirect tax rates do not. These patterns reveal the impact of indirect taxes and suggest the mechanisms by which direct and indirect taxes affect FDI.     

Pollution control and the Ramsey problem

Pollution is an inevitable by-product of production and is only gradually dissolved by the environment. It can be reduced by producing less and by cleaning up the environment, but neither occur when they are left to the market. Cleaning activities and the optimal emission charges increase with the stock of pollutants. When one allows for pollution of the environment in the classical Ramsey problem, the capital stock is less than in the market outcome and a fortiori less than under the golden rule. The analysis distinguishes between stock and flow externalities arising from pollution. An increase in impatience can lead to more capital accumulation, even though this leaves less room for current consumption.