دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله اقتصاد سیاسی مالیات سبز در کشورهای عضو OECD (نشریه اسپرینگر 2003)

اقتصاد سیاسی مالیات بندی سبز در کشورهای عضو OECD

The Political Economy of Green Taxation in OECD Countries

Abstract

This paper addresses the role of politics in environmental policymaking in OECD countries. The public interest theory of regulation assumes that politicians pursue the public good and employ economically efficient instruments such as Pigouvian taxes to discourage polluting activities. Alternative theories of regulation, however, explain more realistically the environmental policymaking process. The theory developed in this paper argues that the goals of raising revenue and industry competitiveness overwhelm the goal of improving environmental quality when politicians set green taxes. This theory is empirically tested with a political economy model using data on OECD countries. The results suggest that policymakers do not set taxes with a specific concern for the environment, but to generate revenues. The model also demonstrates the concavity of the revenue function with respect to emissions; taxes are raised up to an optimal point beyond which raising them would discourage emissions, and thus revenues. Harmful behavior is not discouraged through the imposition of the taxes, since less healthy populations are taxed less. Emissions generated by industries that are exempted from taxation are offset by the industries that are taxed. When polluting products constitute a high share of the exported products, revenues from environmentally related taxes drop. These results help explaining the lack of environmental orientation of green taxes in the OECD countries.

1 Introduction

OECD member countries face a daunting set of environmental challenges that include improving air quality, maintaining adequate water quality, managing solid waste, protecting the ozone layer, and guarding against biodiversity losses. Member countries have addressed these challenges through the use of a number of regulatory instruments that include technology-based command-and-control regulation, performance standards, river basin associations, and the use of taxes and other economic incentives. Over the last decade, instruments based on economic incentives have played a large and growing role in environmental policies of OECD countries.1 All countries have introduced environmental taxes and an increasing number of countries are implementing comprehensive green-tax reforms, while others are contemplating doing so (OECD, 2001).

The mere mention of environmental taxation brings immediately to mind one of the notable contributions of Arthur Cecil Pigou (1920).2 The Pigouvian theory of taxation, which emerges in a discussion of spillover effects that impose costs on non-transacting parties, stipulates that appropriately designed taxes can limit polluting behavior while minimizing social cost. However, as Professor Pigou explained, what seems to be good in theory does not work well in practice (Pigou, 1938, p. 331; 1960, p. 99). Indeed, as he pointed out, environmental taxes will not likely be set on the basis of environmental logic (Barnett and Yandle, forthcoming).

As Pigou predicted, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find taxes that might come close to following a pure Pigouvian prescription (Yandle, 1998, pp. 130–132). Though difficult to construct in the first place, given that to achieve their acclaimed efficiency status, such taxes are to reflect marginal damages on an industry-by-industry, or even better on a plantby-plant basis, the process by which environmental taxes are actually set is complicated by industry competitiveness and revenue raising concerns.3 Because of the political economy struggle, what may on the surface look like an environmental tax, and even be called an environmental tax, can actually be just another way to raise revenues.4 Put differently, environmental pleadings can serve as a useful disguise in the politician’s never-ending search for revenues for redistributional purposes. The extent to which the pursuit of revenue goals may in fact overwhelm or even accompany the effort to achieve environmental goals is an empirical question, which we address in this article. We do so by developing a theory and then presenting empirical results that reject the simple Pigouvian hypothesis. Political revenue seeking seems to be the better explanation of green taxes. The article is organized as follows. The second section reviews the main theories of regulation found in the social science literature. This section also briefly surveys some of the principal OECD environmental taxes and explains how, on the surface, the taxes charged do not square with the ideal Pigouvian criterion of minimizing social cost. In the third section, a political economy theory and a statistical model are developed to explain the variance in the level of environmental taxes collected across OECD countries. The fourth section describes the data used to estimate the model and reports the findings. The last section offers some final thoughts on the research.