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.     

Efficient timing of income taxes

The marginal collection cost of an income tax is predicted to be a martingale, and the marginal income tax rate is predicted to be a supermartingale. Collection costs can be estimated from tax rates. Almost all tests based on a U.S. series of actual marginal income tax rates, 1913–1975, accept the hypothesis of random-walk behavior in collection costs, and reject the parallel hypothesis on tax rates.     

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.     

Do estate and gift taxes affect the timing of private transfers?

Proposals to alter the estate tax are contentious and have been considered largely in an empirical vacuum. This paper examines time series and cross-sectional variation to identify the effects of estate and gift taxation on the timing of private transfers. The analysis is based on data from the 1989, 1992, 1995, 1998, and 2001 Surveys of Consumer Finances. Legislative activity during this period reduced the tax disadvantage of bequests relative to gifts. Moreover, the magnitude of this reduction differed systematically across identifiable household categories. We find that households experiencing larger declines in the expected tax disadvantages of bequests reduced inter vivos transfers relative to households experiencing small declines in the tax disadvantages of bequests. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the timing of transfers is responsive to applicable gift and estate tax rates. The results also provide evidence of a systematic bequest motive for high-wealth households.     

The rate elasticity of Florida tourist development (aka bed) taxes

One aspect of taxation in Florida is unique in that state policymakers have created several different tourist development taxes, generally allowing local governments to adopt up to four of these ad valorem levies (which can total 5%) on transient rentals. The rentals include, but are not limited to, hotel stays. In this article, we estimate the elasticity of this local tax base with respect to the rate for Florida counties with rate changes between 1998 and 2012. Results indicate several significant and large short-term declines from periodic county-level increases in the tax rate, but no significant long-term effects.     

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.     

Revenue-maximizing tax rates in personal income taxation in the presence of consumption taxes: a note

This article computes revenue-maximizing tax rates in personal income taxes in the presence of consumption taxes. It finds that the traditional Laffer analysis, which neglects the effects of marginal tax rates on consumption, overestimates the magnitude of revenue-maximizing tax rates. The bias caused by this oversight is computed.     

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.     

Rethinking the costs related to global warming: A survey of the issues

One approach to the economic analysis of global warming seeks to balance the costs of damage from or adaptation to it with the costs of mitigating it. The costs of adaptation and damage have been estimated using techniques of environmental evaluation, but are subject to a wide margin of uncertainty. The costs of mitigation, principally by reducing the emissions of CO₂, have been estimated using different kinds of economic models, some of the results of which have suggested that very little abatement of carbon emissions is justified before the costs of abatement exceed the benefits of it in terms of foregone damage and adaptation costs. The paper analyses the extent to which this conclusion is a function of the modelling assumptions and techniques used, rather than likely practical outcomes, with regard to the models' treatment of unemployed resources, revenue recycling, prior distortions in the economy due to the tax system and possible dynamic effects from the introduction of a carbon-energy tax. It concludes that, with different and arguably more appropriate treatment of the above issues, especially when the secondary benefits of reducing CO₂ emissions are also taken into account, it is not clear that even substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels will incur net costs, especially if there is the prospect of even moderate costs from global warming.     

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.