The importance of the design of market-based instruments for CO2 mitigation: An AGE analysis for Spain

In the past few decades, economists have defended the use of market-based instruments (MBI) in environmental and climate policy. There have been many papers which have compared the costs of attaining environmental objectives with MBIs and with command and control instruments. However very few have compared different MBIs in examining these costs. This paper seeks to analyse various MBIs for CO₂ mitigation from the viewpoint of cost-effectiveness, using an AGE (applied general equilibrium) model for the case of Spain. A distinction is drawn between (1) quantity instruments, which represent different extents of a market for emission permits; and (2) price instruments, which represent different types of tax. Each instrument can affect different segments of the emission sources and therefore can have very different effects on the economy as a whole. We show how MBI can help to minimise mitigation costs, but also how taxes and tradable emission permits that are limited or constrained by many exemptions and distortions can raise costs considerably.     

Choosing the right instrument

This paper analyses the optimal choice of second-best optimal environmental policies. Using a partial equilibrium model, the paper first reconfirms the well-known result that the existence of a double dividend (in its weak definition) favours environmental policy instruments which maximise tax revenues for a given improvement in environmental quality. Additional revenues can be used to reduce the distortion of existing taxes such as taxes on labour and capital income. Without uncertainty, environmental taxes and auctioned permits are equally appropriate. In the presence of uncertainty, however, the optimal choice of taxes or tradable permits depends on the relative magnitudes of the marginal environmental damage and the marginal benefit from consuming a polluting good. In the second part, the paper, therefore, analyses how the revenue capacity affects the optimal choice of environmental policy instruments in the presence of uncertainty. The paper shows that the first-best choice rule between price and quantity regulation (Weitzman, 1974) remains valid in a second-best world with distortionary taxation.     

A pigovian rule for the optimum provision of public goods

The integrated treatment of optimal taxation and public expenditure presented here is based on the dual relationship between the prices of private goods and the quantities of public goods. The conditions for optimum public good provision can be expressed as a modification of the Samuelson conditions with extra terms representing (a) the distortionary effect of taxes on the willingness to pay for the public good, and (b) distributional effects. The former captures Pigou's notion of the indirect damage caused by the need to finance public expenditure out of distortionary taxes, and we call this the ‘Pigou term’. In certain cases a very simple benefit-cost ratio for public projects emerges that is equivalent to measuring benefits as if they were taxed.     

Environmental quality,the macroeconomy,and intergenerational distribution

The paper studies the dynamic allocation effects and intergenerational welfare consequences of environmental taxes. To this end, environmental externalities are introduced in a Blanchard–Yaari overlapping generations model of a small open economy. A rise in environmental taxes – taking into account pre-existing distortionary taxes and endogenous labor supply – is shown to yield an efficiency gain if agents care enough for the environment. The benefits are unevenly distributed across generations because agents are heterogeneous in their capital ownership. An accompanying debt policy can be designed – prescribing debt accumulation at impact and debt redemption in the new steady state – to ensure everybody gains to the same extent. With lump-sum recycling of environmental tax revenue, aggregate employment is unaffected in the short run, but falls in the long run. Furthermore, it raises environmental quality more in the long run than in the short run. Recycling revenue through a cut in labor taxes, however, is shown to yield a rise in employment in the short run, which disappears during transition. In the new steady state, environmental quality is higher at the expense of a lower level of employment.     

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.     

Health effects and optimal environmental taxes

The literature on environmental taxation in the presence of pre-existing distortionary taxes has shown that interactions with these distortions tend to raise the cost of an environmental tax, and thus that the optimal environmental tax is less than marginal environmental damages. A recent paper by Schwartz and Repetto (2000) challenges this finding, arguing that the health benefits from reduced pollution will also interact with pre-existing taxes, and may cause the optimal environmental tax to exceed marginal damages.Schwartz and Repetto’s analysis represented health effects implicitly in the utility function. In contrast, the present paper explicitly represents health effects in an analytically tractable general equilibrium model. This model shows that interactions with health effects from pollution actually will tend to reduce the optimal environmental tax, contradicting, Schwartz and Repetto’s conclusion. This demonstrates the usefulness of explicitly modeling health effects, and it reinforces the general notion that tax-interactions tend to raise the costs of an environmental tax.     

Do Distortionary Taxes Always Harm Growth?

This paper examines the long-run effects of capital income taxes, labor income taxes, and expenditure taxes in an R&D-based model of endogenous growth with endogenous labor supply. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate how tax effects on long-run growth are influenced by the emergence of indeterminate equilibria. Indeterminacy in this instance arises due to nonseparable preferences between consumption and leisure, in conjunction with prior distortionary taxes. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we show that higher distortionary taxes improve long-run growth, as well as social welfare, when the steady state is indeterminate.     

Optimal fiscal policy in a model with inherited aspirations and habit formation

In this paper, we analyze optimal fiscal policies in an overlapping generations framework, where preferences exhibit aspirations in consumption and environmental quality as well as habit formation. We focus on the second best policies when the government needs to finance a given stream of public expenditures by using distortionary taxes. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which the competitive equilibrium is characterized by levels of capital and environmental quality that are too small and a level of labor supply that is too large. Our numerical simulations show that an optimal fiscal policy can be used as an effective stabilization device and that when consumption taxes are fixed, the planner implements maintenance investment and capital income subsidies while financing public spending through labor and fixed consumption taxes.     

Automatic stabilizers, fiscal rules and macroeconomic stability

This paper analyzes the effect of the fiscal structure upon the trade-off between inflation and output stabilization induced by technological shocks in a DGE model with nominal and real rigidities that also integrates a rich menu of fiscal variables as well as a target on the debt to output ratio. The channels through which fiscal policy affects macroeconomic stability include supply-side effects of distortionary taxes, the procyclical behavior of public spending induced by fiscal rules and the conventional effect of automatic stabilizers operating through disposable (permanent) income. The paper investigates these channels and concludes that, contrary to what has been found in RBC models, distortionary taxes tend to reduce output volatility relative to lump-sum taxes when significant rigidities are present. We also study the stabilization effect of alternative (distortionary) tax structures and find that these are only relevant if substantial rigidities are present.     

Global environment and dynamic games of environmental policy in an international duopoly

This paper examines a differential game model of international pollution control in which polluting oligopolists compete in a third country market. Two alternative policy instruments (emission taxes and command-and-control regulations) are considered. A tougher emission policy in the home country enhances the foreign firm’s competitiveness because of the static “rent-shifting” effect. The foreign country also enjoys a future improvement of the global environmental quality by “free riding” on the home country’s emission reduction effort. Because of these strategic effects, the levels of environmental policy determined in the noncooperative policy game are distorted away from the socially optimal level. Moreover, the emission tax game produces a more distortionary outcome than that in the command-and-control game; it generates more pollution and lower welfare.      

Welfare Effects of Different Public Expenditures and Taxes in the Netherlands

This paper explores the welfare effects of public consumption, income transfers and public investment financed through different types of taxes. One surprising result is that, contrary to public consumption goods, public capital goods do not necessarily become less attractive if distortionary taxes, rather than lump-sum taxes, are necessary to finance them. The numerical simulations reveal that the net welfare effects of public investments in the Netherlands are typically positive if financed through lump-sum taxes or distortionary taxes on labor. However, if a source-based capital tax is adopted to finance public investments, the overall welfare effect may be negative.     

A second-best evaluation of eight policy instruments to reduce carbon emissions

This paper uses a numerical general equilibrium model to compare the costs of alternative policies for reducing carbon emissions in a second-best setting with a distortionary tax on labor. We examine a carbon tax, two energy taxes, and both narrow-based and broad-based emissions permits and performance standards. The presence of pre-existing tax distortions raises the costs of all these policies, and can affect their relative cost rankings. In fact, the superiority of emissions taxes and emissions permits over other instruments can hinge on whether these policies generate revenues that are used to reduce other distortionary taxes.     

A classroom game on a negative externality correcting tax: Revenue return,regressivity, and the double dividend

The concept of negative externality is central to the teaching of environmental economics, but corrective taxes are almost always regressive. How exactly might governments return externality-correcting tax revenue to overcome regressivity and not alter marginal incentives? In addition, there is a desire to achieve a double dividend in the use of externality-correcting taxes, that is, to use the revenue to offset existing distortionary taxes, such as those on labor that produce a dead weight loss. In this article, the authors explain a classroom game that was developed for students to understand the theory of externalities, taxation dead weight loss, and regressivity. Then, the problem helps students explore the actual design of a policy that satisfies the double dividend hypothesis and corrects for regressivity.     

Welfare impacts of equal-yield tax reforms in the UK economy

A multisectoral dynamic general equilibrium tax model with and without announcement effects for open and closed capital markets is used to evaluate efficiency gains and transitional effects from equal-yield tax reforms for seven different taxes in the UK economy. Impacts of an unanticipated tax reform on investment, capital accumulation, output and employment are compared to those of anticipated tax reforms. Households, producers, traders, investors and the government are found to be more capable of adjusting their economic behaviour when tax announcements are made in advance. In equal-yield tax experiments welfare gains up to 1.4% of base year GDP can occur by removing distortions in taxes. Welfare loss of up to 2.05% of it can happen if a less distortionary tax, such as the labour income tax is replaced by more distortionary taxes. These simulation results hold whether the capital markets are closed or open.     

Tax distortions in Sweden and the United States

We calculate the welfare costs of distortionary taxation (including inflation) in models calibrated for the United States and Sweden. The welfare costs are calculated using comparative steady state as well as dynamic analysis, where we take the costs of transition from the distorted to the optimal steady state into account. We also calculate the welfare costs of adding stochastic fluctuations. Our main finding is that the total welfare costs of the distortionary taxes including the distortionary effects of inflation are about five times higher in Sweden than in the United States. Meanwhile, stochastic fluctuations in policy turn out to have a relatively small impact on welfare.     

Prices versus Quantities in a Second-Best Setting

The choice between taxes and tradable permits has been independently analysed by two distinct research traditions. The first proceeds from Weitzman's partial equilibrium stochastic model and concludes that a tax should be preferred if the marginal abatement cost curve is steeper than the marginal environmental benefit curve. The second utilises deterministic general equilibrium models with pre-existing distortionary taxes. It concludes that non-revenue-raising instruments (e.g., grandfathered tradable permits) are costlier than revenue-raising ones (e.g., a tax on every unit of pollution or auctioned permits). To build a bridge between these two traditions, we introduce in Weitzman's model a positive cost of public funds due to pre-existing distortionary taxes. The tax admits a greater comparative advantage over the permits, as compared to Weitzman's classical result. Then, we assume that the regulated industry blocks any proposal that poses it too high an expected burden. This may require a transfer to firms, in the form of freely-allocated permits or lump-sum tax rebate. It turns out that if this acceptability constraint is binding, then the comparative advantage of taxes over permits is still reinforced. Quantitatively, even if the marginal benefit function is 50% more steeply sloped than the marginal cost function, the price instrument should be preferred. We also compare the expected net benefit of these two instruments to a contingent instrument which leads to the ex post optimum. The superiority of the contingent instrument over the quantity one is higher than in first-best.     

Nonseparable Utility and the Double Dividend Debate: Reconsidering the Tax-Interaction Effect

The literature on the use of environmental taxes inthe presence of distortionary (labor) taxes warns thata partial-equilibrium Pigouvian tax analysis is notappropriate because increasing the price of dirtygoods can futher aggravate the prexisting distortions. This argument is most frequently made assuming thatlabor is taxed to meet a fixed revenue requirement.When a dirty good is also taxed, others argue thatthis lowers workers' real wages, causing people toreduce their labor supply below its already suboptimallevel, aggravating labor market distortions. However,most papers ignore the effect that a cleanerenvironment can have on labor supply. That is, mostpast work has assumed that the quality of theenvironment is weakly separable in the utilityfunction. We argue that a cleaner environment canincrease labor supply, at least partially offsettingany incentive for workers to decrease their laborsupply. Further, we show explicitly how relaxing theseparability assumption affects the standardresults.     

Redistribution and the marginal cost of public funds

Discussions of the marginal cost of public funds with distortionary taxation are often cast in the framework of a one-consumer economy, while the main justification of distortionary taxes is that they are needed for redistribution. This paper analyzes the issue in a model with heterogeneous consumers and a linear income tax, focusing on the tradeoff between labour market distortions and the redistribution from high-wage to low-wage workers. In an optimal tax system the MCF will be the same for all sources of funds and under certain assumptions less than one. Without optimality the MCF will in general differ between different sources of finance.     

Income and substitution effects of fiscal policy on work effort

The focus of this paper is twofold. First, it examines the impact on work effort of changes in government purchases financed with lump‐sum taxes, in a neoclassical framework, with respect to four industrialised countries. Second, it reconsiders the expenditure–work effort relationship in a broader conceptual context that allows for distortionary taxation and a disaggregation of the income and substitution effects. Our findings are shown to cast doubt on the empirical plausibility of the prevailing (neoclassical and New Keynesian) models which seem to rely heavily on the lump‐sum tax notion, thus ignoring the substitution effects of distortionary taxation.     

FISCAL POLICY, MACROECONOMIC STABILITY AND FINITE HORIZONS

In this paper we analyse the stabilisation properties of distortionary taxes in a new‐Keynesian model with overlapping generations of finitely lived consumers. In this framework, government debt is part of net wealth and this adds a number of interesting channels through which fiscal policy could affect output and inflation. Output volatility, in the presence of technology shocks, is not substantially affected by the operation of automatic stabilisers, but we find interesting composition effects. While the presence of finitely lived households strengthens the stabilisation performance of distortionary taxes through the reduction of the volatility of consumption, it does so at the cost of more volatile investment and real money balances.