Fiscal instruments are potentially among the most effective, and cost-effective, options for addressing externalities related to poor air quality, urban road congestion, and greenhouse gases. This paper takes a case study, focused on Mauritius (a pioneer in the use of green taxes) to illustrate how existing taxes, especially on fuels and vehicles, could be reformed to better address these exter...

BACKGROUND Increases in tobacco taxes are widely regarded as a highly effective strategy for reducing tobacco use and its consequences. METHODS The voluminous literature on tobacco taxes is assessed, drawing heavily from seminal and recent publications reviewing the evidence on the impact of tobacco taxes on tobacco use and related outcomes, as well as that on tobacco tax administration. RE...

We compare the effects of taxes and quotas for an environmental problem where the regulator and polluter have asymmetric information about abatement costs, and environmental damage depends on pollution stock. An increase in the slope of the marginal abatement cost curve, or a decrease in the slope of the marginal damage curve, favors taxes. An increase in the discount rate or the stock decay ra...

The past academic literature on tax policy has focused almost entirely on the analysis of tax structures in the richest countries, particularly the U.S. Overall the optimal tax models explain reasonably well the observed tax policies in these countries. As summarized in Gordon (2000), for example, past theoretical work suggests that taxes on consumption or labor income should dominate use of ca...

We document contemporaneous differences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 17 European countries and the US. Based on a model of joint household decision making, we quantify the contribution of international differences in non-linear labor income taxes and consumption taxes, as well as the educational composition, and gender wage gaps and educational premia, to the internat...

The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the politician chooses extractive policies, citizens throw him out of power. We analyse the efficient sustainable ...

The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the interactions between various taxes and GDP, and to detect whether taxes function as an automatic stabilizer in Turkey. Firstly, When using a time series unit-root test as proposed by Dickey-Fuller (1979), econometric findings revealed that taxes and level of GDP are not static. Secondly, upon employing cointegration designed by Johans...

We let consumers vote on tax regimes in experimental markets. We test if taxes on sellers are more popular than taxes on consumers, i.e. on voters themselves, even if taxes on sellers are inefficiently high. Taxes on sellers are more popular if voters underestimate the extent of tax shifting in the market. We show that inexperienced voters are prone to such a tax-shifting bias, that experience ...

Public finance experts have long explored the issue of income taxes making the cost of market transactions higher than nonmarket ones. A 50 percent income tax, for example, requires $20,000 in income to purchase $10,000 of market goods. The tax can be avoided, however, if the same goods can be produced at home. The upshot is that income taxes encourage the home production of goods and services ...

OBJECTIVE Global health challenges include non-communicable disease burdens, ensuring food security in the context of rising food prices, and environmental constraints around food production, e.g., greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions. We therefore aimed to consider optimized solutions to the mix of food items in daily diets for a developed country population: New Zealand (NZ). METHODS We conducted...