Earmarking and the political support of fat taxes.

Earmarking Tobacco Taxes for Health Purposes via Median Entities

Tax Earmarking and Grass-roots Accountability

We ask whether tax earmarking can foster accountability in public provision of goods and services when consumers can privately monitor provision. We show that earmarking can raise the stakes that consumers have in monitoring public provision independently of how taxes are earmarked, because it introduces a more direct linkage between monitoring and taxes paid.

Paying for Public Spending: Is There a Role for Earmarked Taxes?

Tax earmarking, or hypothecation, refers to the assigning of receipts either from a single tax base, or as a proportion from a wider pool of revenue, to a specific end use; it contrasts with general fund financing of expenditure from consolidated receipts. The idea has been seized on both by those who want to defend the public sector who think it would make taxation popular and by those who wan...

Guest Commentary: Fat and other taxes, lessons for the implementation of preventive policies.

Fat, sugar or sweetened beverage taxes are part of an overall public health nutrition approach to healthy eating. They are not approaches that on their own are likely to bring about change. Policy evidence from existing food tax implementation suggest that taxes need to be paralleled by subsidies and other interventions to encourage healthy eating. Such dual methods help not only contribute to ...

Road Taxes, Road User Charges and Earmarking

The UK Road Fund was set up in 1921 and financed by earmarked taxes, but was unsuccessful as a form of road finance and abandoned in 1937. The paper examines why earmarking failed and what problems arise for replacing road taxes by hypothecated road charges. These charges would need to be regulated and could evolve into a more efficient system of road pricing. The paper claims that recent exper...