earmarking tobacco taxes for health purposes via median entities

Earmarking Tobacco Taxes for Health Purposes via Median Entities

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...

Tobacco taxation: the importance of earmarking the revenue to health care and tobacco control

BACKGROUND Increases in tobacco taxation are acknowledged to be one of the most effective tobacco control interventions. This study aimed at determining the mediating role of socioeconomical status (SES) and the earmarking of revenue to healthcare and tobacco control, in influencing population support for the adoption of a 2 Euro tobacco tax increase in Greece, amid the challenging economic env...

Earmarking and the political support of fat taxes.

An unhealthy good causes health issues in the long run. It creates a misperceived utility loss and increases health care costs. Conversely, a healthy good provides misperceived utility gains and reduces health care costs. Individuals differ in income and in their degree of misperception; they vote over a fat tax according to their misperceived utility. A fraction of the tax proceeds is "earmark...

Tobacco taxes and regressivity.

Recent literature on tobacco taxation suggests that optimal tax rates should be very high. But such high taxes raise concerns over regressivity. Most econometric estimates of elasticities by income group use historic price data that are low, and the usefulness of such estimates is therefore questionable on account of the serious 'out of sample' prediction problem. To address that problem, this ...

The Politics of Consumption Taxes: Globalization and the Median Voter

The regressive nature of consumption taxes poses a challenge to partisan theory. Using data for up to 20 OECD countries in the period 1970-2003 this article aims to explore the question of whether the idea that social democratic governments typically have to compromise on policy goals and core constituency interests to make themselves more appealing to the median voter necessitates the use of r...