access to markets and rural poverty evidence from household consumption in china abstract this paper presents evidence on the effects of access to domestic and international markets on per capita consumption of households using data from rural china the econometric analysis uses alternative identification schemes to address the potential endogeneity of access to markets we use straight line distances to coastline and navigable river along with the topography of the intervening counties as sources of exogeneous variations we also use identification through heteroskedasticity which does not rely on standard exclusion restrictions the results from alternative identification schemes show that better access to both domestic and international markets has positive effects on per capita consumption the domestic market effect is significantly larger in magnitude and there is complementarity between the access to domestic and international markets

tax structure and corruption cross country evidence one common feature of the current literature on corruption especially the empirical contributions to it is the emphasis on the exogenous determinants of corruption which are generally beyond the direct control of governments to date little is known about how the design of government policy potentially affects the level of corruption in a country even though there is growing recognition that the design and administration of tax and spending policies play important roles in promoting or discouraging corrupt practices using a large sample of countries over the 1995 2009 period this paper fills the gap by conducting the first analysis in the literature to examine the significance of the tax structure as measured by both tax mix and tax complexity in determining corruption our results suggest the following 1 countries relying more heavily on direct taxes tend to exhibit less corruption than countries that rely more heavily on indirect taxes and 2 countries with more complex tax systems tend to be more corrupt than countries with less complex tax systems these results are robust across alternative measures of corruption and tax structure and alternative estimations with and without correcting the potential endogeneity issue of the tax structure variables

tax innovations and public revenues in sub saharan africa we study the effect of two tax innovations value added taxes vat and autonomous revenue authorities ara on tax revenues in sub saharan africa the dataset consists of 47 countries over 1980 2010 we find that vats have no effect on total tax revenues neither in the short nor in the long run aras lead to higher tax revenues in the short and medium run but the effect dissipates over time the main conclusion is that tax innovations are not a panacea to overcome the revenue shortages in african countries but they are helpful in the short and medium run

the death of the pigovian tax policy implications from the double dividend debate recently economists appear to have abandoned a central precept of environmental policy optimal environmental taxes are equal to marginal environmental damage med as a consequence of labor market distortions optimal environmental taxes are now generally argued to typically lie below med and given realistic policy constraints on optimal tax reform sometimes well below med this new consensus is reflected in over a dozen papers published without rebuttal in prestigious economics journals in important survey articles and in policy oriented manuscripts how was it possible that such a radical transformation of economic thinking occurred with essentially no debate in the literature

optimal environmental charges taxes easy to estimate and surplus yielding the estimation of the optimal charges taxes on environmental disruption and the financing of the spending on the abatement of environmental disruption are important practical problems this paper shows that for most cases where some abatement is desirable both the estimation and the financing problems may be easily solved it is desirable to charge disruption at least at the marginal cost of abatement which is easier to estimate than the marginal damage of disruption and such a charge will normally yield total revenue in excess of the amount of abatement spending

rising u s earnings inequality and family labor supply the covariance structure of intrafamily earnings this paper studies the labor supply contributions to individual and family earnings inequality during the period of rising wage inequality in the early 1980 s working couples have positively correlated labor market outcomes which are almost entirely attributable to permanent factors an intertemporal family labor supply model with this feature is used to estimate labor supply elasticities for husbands of 0 05 and wives of 0 40 this implies that labor supply explains little of the rising annual earnings inequality for married men but over 20 percent of the rise in family inequality and 50 percent of the modest rise in female inequality

carbon taxation when climate affects productivity optimal carbon taxation is evaluated in a model where climate change affects productivity with a numerical us economy model with preexisting taxes the optimal carbon tax is found to exceed marginal social damage by 53 percent and marginal private damage the sum of households marginal willingness to pay by 73 percent the welfare gain from optimal carbon taxation is estimated at 3 58 billion per year when marginal damages are 40 ton employment also increases setting the carbon tax at the pigouvian rate raises welfare by only 3 17 billion the contrasting results in the tax interaction literature are due to the use of marginal private damage when applied to amenity externalities

the present value criterion and environmental taxation the suboptimality of first best decision rules this paper examines the links between environmental taxes and distortionary taxation in a dynamic model of climate change and economic growth under first best conditions labor and capital would remain untaxed and carbon dioxide emissions would be taxed at a rate equal to the present value marginal cost they impose on future society setting the discount rate equal to the marginal productivity of capital under secondbest conditions however this decision rule substantially understates optimal emissions taxes when the resulting revenues are used to provide targeted cuts in distortionary taxes conversely relatively low emissions taxes are economically justified given lump sum revenue recycling

the effects of the value added tax on revenue and inequality this paper examines the impact of the introduction of the value added tax on inequality and government revenues using newly released macro data we present both conventional country fixed effect re

economic inequality in the arab region the paper uses harmonized household survey micro data to assess the levels and determinants of economic inequality in 12 arab countries it focuses on the sources of rural urban as well as metropolitan nonmetropolitan inequalities and applies the unconditional quantile regression decomposition technique to analyze the welfare gaps across the entire distribution the analysis finds moderate inequality levels with the gini coefficient for the distribution of household real per capita total expenditures ranging between 30 7 in libya and 45 in mauritania differences in households endowments such as demographic composition human capital and community characteristics appear as the main sources of the urban rural welfare gap there is inequality between metropolitan and non metropolitan regions in many countries mainly because of differences in returns to households characteristics and particularly returns to human capital

when is growth pro poor evidence from a panel of countries abstract growth is pro poor if the poverty measure of interest falls according to this definition there are three potential sources of pro poor growth a a high growth rate of average incomes b a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes and c a poverty reducing pattern of growth in relative incomes i empirically decompose changes in poverty in a sample of developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s into these three components in the medium to long run most of the variation in changes in poverty can be attributed to growth in average incomes suggesting that policies and institutions that promote broad based growth should be central to the pro poor growth agenda most of the remainder of the variation in changes in poverty is due to poverty reducing patterns of growth in relative incomes rather than differences in the sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes cross country evidence provides relatively little guidance as to the policies and institutions that promote these other sources of pro poor growth

tax interaction effects environmental regulation and rule of thumb adjustments to social cost preexisting distortions in factor markets complicate the estimation of the social welfare effects of regulatory interventions the existence of these tax interaction effects ties suggests that general equilibrium ge approaches should be used to evaluate regulatory policies however formal ge analysis is not always feasible for the numerous environmental regulations proposed by federal state and local agencies the question addressed in this paper is whether an empirically based rule of thumb upward adjustment factor is appropriate to properly scale social cost estimates in environmental policy we argue that such rule of thumb adjustments are significantly less reliable than estimates based on a detailed general equilibrium analysis because of the uncertainty about both the magnitude and sign of the social cost distortion in addition to addressing this question the paper gives an overview of ties and their relevance to environmental policy

female labor supply in the context of inflation inflation has become in the 1970 s an important economic phenomenon that must be taken into account in analyzing the determinants of labor supply trends traditional labor supply theory has focused on the overriding importance of real wage growth as a primary determinant of both the long run secular decline in hours of work and the postwar increase in the labor force participation rate of married women within this context any labor supply effects of price level changes have been subsumed under the overall effect of real wages however despite unusually rapid price increases as well as stagnation in the growth of productivity and real wages in the last decade the growth in women s labor force participation has continued and if anything accelerated in the last decade thus it is clear that today factors other than real wage growth must lie behind this continuing upward trend inflation is well worth exploring as a possible independent influence on labor supply because of both its growing visibility and the frequency with which one hears comments along the lines of in these inflationary times a family needs two salaries to make ends meet our objective in this paper is to explore the possible effects of inflation on women s labor supply trends as a first step in this direction we present some empirical results relating changes in the labor force participation rates of women in various age groups to inflation as well as other independent variables covering the period 1956 77 inflation clearly appears to have an effect on labor force participation rates above and beyond the effect it generates through reducing the real wage by next examining the primary sources of women s labor force growth in the last decade and their implications for long run labor supply we suggest the likely importance of inflationary expectations in sustaining the long term growth of women s labor supply particularly in the prime age group

the extent of the market and stages of agricultural specialization this paper provides empirical evidence of nonlinearity in the relationship between crop specialization in a village economy and the extent of the market size of the urban market relevant for the village the results suggest that the portfolio of crops in a village economy becomes more diversified initially as the extent of the market increases however after the market size reaches a threshold the production structure becomes specialized again this evidence on the stages of agricultural diversification is consistent with the stages of diversification identified in the recent literature for the economy as a whole and also for the manufacturing sector the evidence highlights the importance of improving farmers access to markets through investment in transport infrastructure and removal of barriers to trading

risk coping and starvation in rural china we use a 3 year panel from two poor provinces in southern china to examine the nature of risks to which rural households are exposed and their ability to insure calorie consumption and spending of total consumption against idiosyncratic shocks to their income we find that idiosyncratic risks are indeed the main source of income variation in the sample consumption is better insured than total spending unlike total spending where full insurance is rejected in most cases calorie intake is completely insured for both land rich and land poor households in both provinces access to even modest amounts of land significantly enhances households ability to guard against total spending land rich households are much better insured against total spending than land poor households the results are robust across model specifications although generalized method of moments gmm estimations increase the magnitude of difference in total spending between the land rich and the land poor policies targeting poverty red

when can carbon abatement policies increase welfare the fundamental role of distorted factor markets abstract this paper employs analytical and numerical models to assess the welfare effects of a revenue neutral carbon tax and nonauctioned carbon emissions permits taking into account preexisting tax distortions in factor markets the presence of preexisting taxes significantly raises the general equilibrium costs of both policies this cost increase is much greater under emissions permits since this policy does not generate revenues to reduce distortionary taxes under our central estimates emissions permits cannot increase welfare unless environmental damages exceed about 18 per ton of carbon in contrast an appropriately scaled carbon tax is welfare improving so long as environmental damages are positive

optimal environmental taxation in the presence of other taxes general equilibrium analyses this paper examines the optimal setting of environmental taxes in economies where other distortionary taxes are present we employ analytical and numerical models to explore the degree to which in a second best economy optimal environmental tax rates differ from the rates implied by the pigovian principle according to which the optimal tax rate equals the marginal environmental damages both models indicate contrary to what several analysts have suggested that the optimal tax rate on emissions of a given pollutant is generally less than the rate supported by the pigovian principle moreover the optimal rate is lower the larger are the distortions posed by ordinary taxes numerical results indicate that previous studies may have seriously overstated the size of the optimal carbon tax by disregarding pre existing taxes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

graduate education in ecological economics abstract interest in graduate education in ecological economics is increasing however no formal plan of study for a phd in ecological economics has been disseminated the lack of a formal plan is problematic as the field of ecological economics matures interest grows and new programs are being developed this paper attempts to fill a void by creating a program of study addressing the proficiencies a graduate student in ecological economics should have upon completion of his her phd based on the us educational system the plan of study presented in this paper has been developed to make the graduate of an ecological economics program as competitive on the labor market as students awarded traditional economics degrees the plan i describe is created to meet the requirements necessary for a phd in ecological economics further fields of specialization are suggested to complement the core of an ecological economics program to enhance the education process and to give the student with an ecological economics degree a higher level of marketability

does education reduce income inequality a meta regression analysis this paper reexamines the effects of education on inequality through a comprehensive meta regression analysis of the extant empirical literature we find that education affects the two tails of the distribution of income education reduces the income share of top earners and increases the share of the bottom earners education has been particularly effective in reducing inequality in africa some of the results suggest that secondary schooling appears to have a stronger effect than primary schooling though this finding is not always robust the heterogeneity in reported estimates can be largely explained by differences in the specification of the econometric model and measure of inequality and education

labor supply and the double dividend abstract a series of recent articles have argued that environmental taxes and cap and trade permit systems generate large distortions in the labor market the claim is made that the higher prices for dirty goods induced by these incentive based systems generate a tax interaction effect leading to reductions in labor supply that are generally on net welfare reducing for this reason it is argued a double dividend seldom exists however price level increases both by lowering family income and by reducing cross spousal wage substitution effects will tend to have offsetting positive impacts on labor supply these effects are large enough to convert negative labor supply responses to rising prices into positive ones the empirical literature also supports a positive relationship between price level increases and labor supply these observations cast doubt on a central critical assumption underlying the critique of the double dividend in the tax interaction effect literature