in praise of frank ramsey s contribution to the theory of taxation frank ramsey s brilliant 1927 paper modestly entitled a contribution to the theory of taxation is a landmark in the economics of public finance nearly a half century later through the work of diamond and mirrlees 1971 and mirrlees 1971 his paper can be thought of as launching the field of optimal taxation and revolutionising public finance ramsey f p 1927 a contribution to the theory of taxation economic journal vol 37 145 pp 47 61

property rights externalities and resource degradation locating the tragedy abstract resource degradation in the third world is largely driven by the demands of farm households for fuelwood and land for agriculture since resources are often controlled through indigenous systems of property the tragedy of the commons has been used to explain resource degradation as a result private property is suggested as a solution to resource degradation a dynamic model capable of examining household incentives for resource use under private and common property is developed results of the model reject the conventional wisdom that gives rise to the presumed optimality of private individual property in natural resources and the correlated indictment of group management regimes

activity choice labor allocation and forest use in malawi this article examines the determinants of activity choice affecting forest use among low income households in malawi data from three villages are used to estimate a system of household labor share equations for maize production forest employment and non forest employment a system estimation approach is used to identify factors influencing the competing and synergistic livelihood strategies which households undertake at the forest margin results from constrained maximum likelihood estimation indicate heightened incentives to degrade forests when returns to forest use are high factors reducing forest pressure include favorable returns to non forest employment secondary education of the household head and wealth

the environment and emerging development issues development economics for the most part has failed to recognize renewable environmental resources as economic goods yet the lives of the poor in developing countries are intimately tied to the fate of their local common property resources soil fuel wood water and so on ignoring the loss of common property renewable resources via degradation centralization or privatization in calculations of net national product can mask the destruction of resources available to a country s poor behind the false appearance of a growing national economy this paper describes the difference between the problem of managing local common property resources in developing countries and the problem of protecting the global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans it outlines the calculations that would include the local commons in the national income accounting of capital assets and argues that the interests of those most dependent on the increasingly scarce local commons will be best served by placing control in their hands while the central government provides infrastructure and educational support to control the pollution of the global commons on the other hand the paper sketches a plan in which most countries would have a high incentive to participate a global allocation of limited tradable permits to discharge defined pollutants

applied general equilibrium models of taxation and international trade an introduction and survey we wish to acknowledge the help of three referees and of john pencavel on several earlier drafts as well as the assistance of the modelers whose work is referred to in the paper they corrected our lack of understanding of their work and provided many other helpful comments excellent research and bibliographical assistance have been provided by debbie fretz radwan shaban and janet stotsky helpful comments have been made by charles ballard michael boskin lans bovenberg sylvester damus harvey galper glenn harrison gordon lenjosek jack mutti serena ng t n srinivasan charles stuart and eric toder the authors also acknowledgefinancial support from the national bureau of economic research the national science foundation international business machines and the social sciences and humanities research council ottawa canada

macro scale economic influences on tropical forest depletion abstract the paper examines the influence of global and domestic factors on forest depletion in 45 tropical developing countries from 1967 to 1985 it links forest depletion with conditions in the international markets and with domestic macroeconomic and demographic factors calculated elasticities suggest that real exchange rate devaluation debt service food self sufficiency income and export prices of forestry and agricultural output had significant influence on the depletion of tropical forests during the study period

the tragedy of the commons in cote d ivoire agriculture empirical evidence and implications for evaluating trade policies expansion of cultivated land diminishes the extent of forestlands or reduces the length of fallow periods and hence reduces the amount of natural vegetation the increase in land under cultivation has a direct output increasing effect at the cost of reducing natural capital and agricultural productivity the evidence for western cote d ivoire is consistent with and provides an explanation for the declining agricultural productivity observed in sub saharan africa during the past few decades this article uses a theoretical model to determine the level of land cultivation that maximizes village income using data from cote d ivoire for 1985 87 an important part of the land is under common property usually at the village level the results show that farmers do not internalize even a small fraction of the external cost of biomass in their land allocation decisions the lack of internalization of the social cost of the biomass resource leads to large income losses at the village level as much as 14 percent of village income these losses are many times larger than the usual estimates for conventional distortions

second best taxation of emissions and polluting goods abstract this paper studies the problem of the design of an integrated system of second best emission and output taxes in a model where production costs are negatively correlated with their emissions it shows that i the first best pigouvian rule of equating the marginal private benefit of emissions in production to the marginal social damage of emissions must be modified in the second best ii implementation of the modified pigouvian rule requires all firms to face the same marginal emission tax equal to the marginal social damage of emissions plus an adjustment term reflecting optimal tax objectives iii it may not be necessary to directly tax the polluting goods the latter taxes can be subsumed in the emission tax function iv output taxes must be set solely on the basis of optimal tax objectives no pigouvian adjustment is required v if emission taxes are restricted to be proportional and commodity taxes are constrained the modified pigouvian rule will no longer be optimal vi if preferences are weakly separable in emissions and other goods the pigouvian rule remains valid the marginal emission tax is pigouvian and emission and commodity tax instruments can be set separately to address different objectives a proportional emission tax corrects for externalities while commodity taxes are determined solely on the basis of optimal tax considerations

revenue recycling within transport networks abstract in this paper we analyse second best pricing and investment policy for transport networks with a revenue recycling mechanism in which the toll revenue is used for transport investments or subsidies as in london s congestion charging scheme the results of this paper demonstrate that the way toll revenue is used modifies the usual results significantly which are typically based on assuming a lump sum transfer first recycling revenue as investment increases the second best toll when the benefits from the investment exceed the costs and when demand is inelastic with respect to the toll recycling revenue as a subsidy has no such effect second partial cost benefit analysis that focuses only on the targeted transport mode would usually lead to erroneous conclusions about whether toll revenues should be used for transport investment subsidies or general tax revenues thus full cost benefit analysis which accounts for changes in consumer and producer surpluses in all transport modes is necessary

road transport externalities during the last decade much progress has been made in defining measuring the external costs of transport as the cost of tolling equipment falls the set of realistic policy options to internalise these externalities will continue to grow this will determine the research and policy agenda we make three points firstly empirical work is still necessary to better identify marginal external costs including congestion accident and environmental costs secondly any assessment of policy options should treat externalities simultaneously the use of pricing instruments and emissions standards are discussed within this framework thirdly we emphasise the role of government designing the optimal road pricing institutions requires consideration of horizontal and vertical tax competition while double dividend arguments are central to the question of securing public support

optimal two part tariffs in a model of discrete choice abstract in this paper we study welfare optimal two part tariffs in a model of discrete choice the determinants of the sign and magnitude of the fixed and variable tax are analysed in terms of the nature and degree of consumer heterogeneity the price sensitivities of participation probabilities and conditional demands and the nature of distributional concerns in the absence of distributional concerns the model generalises the corrected ramsey rule for the variable tax and it shows that in the absence of collection or fixed participation costs the fixed fee may be negative the conditions that determine the sign of the participation fee turn out to have an intuitive economic interpretation finally the implications of distributional concerns for the optimal fixed and variable taxes are analysed

welfare analysis of tax reforms using household data abstract this paper discusses a methodology for calculating the distribution of gains and losses from a policy change using data for a large sample of households estimates are based on the equivalent income function which is money metric utility defined over observable variables this enables calculations to be standardised and a computer program to compute the statistics presented in the paper is available for a general demand system equivalent income is related to measures of deadweight loss and standard errors are computed for each of the welfare measures an application to u k data for 5 895 households is given which simulates a reform that involves eliminating housing subsidies

environmental externalities in traditional agriculture and the impact of trade liberalization the case of ghana abstract this paper provides a framework for the evaluation of trade policies that explicitly considers the effects of such policies on the environmental resources biomass in doing this we estimate the effects of biomass as a factor of agricultural production and test the hypothesis that farmers efficiently exploit biomass a resource held in common property the main findings are i biomass is an important factor of production in ghanian agriculture ii the biomass resource is exploited beyond the socially optimal level iii a deepening of trade liberalization is likely to induce further losses of biomass and deforestation and iv national income is likely to fall in response to further trade liberalization

marginal tax reform externalities and income distribution the paper examines welfare improving and revenue neutral directions marginal policy reforms for an economy with nonidentical individuals and an externality that has a feedback effect on the consumption of taxed goods it considers three types of policy instruments the indirect taxes the uniform poll transfer and public abatement this extends the framework set up by ahmad and stern 1984 bovenberg and de mooij 1994 and schob 1996 the theoretical model is illustrated for a specific externality namely congestion caused by peak car transport

environmental policy public finance and the labour market in a second best world abstract environmental and tax policies and the optimal provision of clean and dirty public goods are analysed within the context of a second best framework of optimal taxation households consume both clean and dirty commodities degradation of the natural environment occurs due to the consumption of dirty private and public goods but can be offset when the government engages in abatement activities increased environmental concern implies a higher dirt tax a lower tax on labour less employment more public abatement and a cleaner environment if the elasticity of substitution between private consumption commodities and leisure is large and that between clean and dirty goods is small public consumption may expand while private consumption contracts otherwise public consumption falls

economic development and environmental management in the uplands of southeast asia challenges for policy and institutional development using a philippine case study site the forces driving the recent evolution of economic behavior and institutional arrangements in upland and forest margin areas of southeast asia are considered in early modern development subsistence agriculture using long phase forest fallow rotations and regulated by customary law was replaced by more intensive commercially oriented farming systems a process heavily influenced by internal migration to the agricultural frontier traditional land and resource use institutions were quickly displaced during this shift both de facto through the actions of colonists and de jure through the state s assertion of ownership over forests and uplands and the introduction of private title to agricultural lands yet the effective implementation of natural resource use constraints lagged substantially behind the pace of agricultural development and forest exploitation resulting in a period in which high demand for such resources coincided with virtually open access these processes were noticeably subject to the influence of policies and reforms affecting markets prices and institutions

an optimal path to extinction poverty and resource degradation in the open agrarian economy this paper constructs a model of the open agrarian economy in order to explore the tendency of many such economies to evolve along paths characterised by severe environmental degradation it pays special attention to the importance of commodity prices and the transfer system in determining agricultural activity levels in ecologically delicate systems

transboundary externalities in the environmental transition hypothesis the environmental kuznets curve ekc is a hypothesis which implies that it is possible to grow out of environmental degradation most theoretical models of the ekc relation have not accounted for transboundary and intergenerational externalities nor have empirical studies provided evidence that validates an inverted u shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth for pollution problems where the effects are far displaced or are long delayed

tied transfers and paternalistic preferences why do parents make inter vivos transfers to their children and leave them postmortem bequests 1 gary becker s notions of altruism 1981 ch 8 by which he means that children s utilities are arguments of their parents utility function provides one explanation denoting the children s utility functions by u ci where ci denotes consumption by child i the preferences of parents with two children can be represented by a utility function of the form w cp u1 c1 u2 c2 where cp is the parents own consumption 2 in the altruistic model parents sole motive for intergenerational transfers is to increase their children s utility in other models however parents may have nonaltruistic as well as altruistic motives for transferring resources to their children the literature on economic development emphasizes old age support as a motive for fertility and to a lesser degree as a motive for providing children with human capital as part of an explicit or implicit intergenerational contract when human capital formation is the primary focus of the analysis as in discussions of education and earnings it is useful to decompose inter vivos transfers into human capital formation and other inter vivos transfers such a decomposition can mislead in discussing intergenerational transfers however because it obscures the fact that the provision of human capital by parents constitutes an intergenerational transfer laurence kotlikoff and avia spivak 1981 analyze another old age support model one in which the family operates as an incomplete annuities market in their model children make regular transfers to their aging parents and the share that each child contributes to the parents determines his or her share of the parental estate although the prospect of old age support may be an important motive for downstream intergenerational transfers i e from parents to children in some societies in the united states today upstream transfers appear too small and too uncertain to make this motive credible to explain downstream transfers in the united states today economists have investigated other models in which parents have selfish as well as selfless motives for example b douglas bernheim andrei shleifer and lawrence summers propose a model in which parents use the prospect of bequests to exact services from their children we envision a testator who though altruistic is also affected by actions taken individually by a number of potential beneficiaries he may e g enjoy receiving attention from his children 1985 p 1046 bernheim et al assume that such actions increase parents utility and decrease children s utilities in their model the children s utility functions become u1 ai ci where ai denotes services the ith child provides the parents and the parents utility function becomes w cp al a2 ul al c1 u2 a2 ca to measure these services bernheim et al use frequency of contact i e visits plus telephone calls between parents and children this approach expands the concept of child services to include those provided by adult children who live outside the parents household in an attempt to explain bequests and inter vivos transfers child services originally appeared in discussions of fertility and the allocation of resources to young children living with their parents and thus tends to evoke the joys of young parenthood university of pennsylvania philadelphia pa 19104 and university of washington i am grateful to the national science foundation and the national institutes of health for financial support to gary becker samuel preston david stapleton and paul taubman for helpful comments and to judith farnbach for editonal assistance 1 even if bequests are unplanned as some versions of the life cycle savings model assume inter vivos transfers must be intentional 21 ignore the possible dependence of the children s utility on their own children s utility etc because it is not relevant to the issues discussed in this paper

optimal taxation of car ownership car use and public transport insights derived from a discrete choice numerical optimization model in this paper we study the taxation of car ownership car use and public transport in the presence of externalities within the framework of a discrete continuous choice model we first derive optimal taxes in a simplified setting emphasizing the specific role of fixed car ownership taxes and the relevance of public transport demand by non car owners for the optimal tax structure a numerical optimisation model is then constructed to study welfareoptimal public transport fares and two part tariffs on ownership and use of gasoline and diesel cars in belgium results are as follows first we find that the current differences in tax treatment between diesel and gasoline car ownership and use cannot be justified on the basis of external cost and budgetary considerations efficient pricing requires substantial increases in the relative user tax on diesel cars as compared to gasoline cars optimal fixed taxes are substantially below current levels and only marginally differ between car fuel types second if for political or technical reasons variable car taxes cannot be optimally adjusted large differences in fixed car taxes do result the same holds if the government uses kilometre taxes as the main variable tax instrument third the results of a series of marginal tax reform exercises suggest that a shift form gasoline towards diesel taxation is welfare improving both for fixed and variable taxes somewhat surprisingly a shift from fixed towards variable taxes is not necessarily welfare improving it is for diesel but not for gasoline cars

optimal tax and public investment rules for congestion type of externalities optimal government policy is considered in a second best framework where consumers and producers cause an externality of the congestion type and income distribution issues are taken into account the theoretical results of the optimal tax literature are adapted using the concept of the net social pigouvian tax an illustrative age model uncovers the relative importance of its components the model demonstrates that the level of the externality tax does not depend strongly on distribution concerns as reoptimization of the other taxes ensures that the income distribution objective is reached the model also allows us to study the interaction between externality taxes and public abatement

economy and environment a theoretical essay on the interdependence of economic and environmental systems preface notation guide 1 introduction part i the physical economy environment system 2 closed physical systems a model 3 structure and time in the physical system 4 technological change and the environmental constraints to physical growth part ii the economic system 5 the price system 6 prices property and the environment 7 economic conflict and environmental change part iii environmental strategies in an evolutionary economy environment system 8 time uncertainty and external effects 9 the market solution 10 the stationary state 11 conclusions references index

the tragedy of the commons in cote d lvoire agriculture expansion of cultivated land diminishes the extent of forestlands or reduces the length of fallow periods and hence reduces the amount of natural vegetation the increase in land under cultivation has a direct output increasing effect at the cost of reducing natural capital and agricultural productivity the evidence for western cote d lvoire is consistent with and provides an explanation for the declining agricultural productivity observed in sub saharan africa during the past few decades this article uses a theoretical model to determine the level of land cultivation that maximizes village income using data from cote d lvoire for 1985 87 an important part of the land is under common property usually at the village level the results show that farmers do not internalize even a small fraction of the external cost of biomass in their land allocation decisions the lack of internalization of the social cost of the biomass resource leads to large income losses at the village level as much as 14 perce

agricultural trade liberalization growth welfare and large country effects abstract the impacts of trade liberalization for india have been examined with an applied general equilibrium model with nine agricultural sectors one non tradeable nonagriculture sector and one tradeable nonagriculture sector and with five rural and five urban expenditure classes different scenarios are generated using the model since comparison of gdp in two alternative scenarios can be misleading the policy alternatives are assessed on the basis of their impact on welfare in terms of equivalent incomes of different expenditure classes a policy is assessed preferable only when the distribution of welfare is found to be preferable in a well defined way it demonstrates the importance of accounting for large country effects in rice trade and estimates the welfare optimal tariff quota for rice exports for india which is shown to be just half a million tons of net export of rice the results also show that nonagricultural trade liberalization is even more important for agriculture than even agricultural trade liberalization both of which help accelerate growth

welfare measurement in the household production framework the household production approach to consumer behavior developed from the work of gary becker william gorman and kelvin lancaster has considerable descriptive appeal in modelling the decisions of households the approach derives from the observation that households frequently purchase market goods that do not yield utility directly but are combined to produce commodity service flows which the household values thus observed behavior is determined by household production technology as well as by tastes the advantage of this distinction is that we can pose reasonable hypotheses about characteristics of technology though we rarely possess useful a priori information regarding tastes the putative advantages of the household production approach are questioned on empirical and conceptual grounds by robert pollak and michael wachter 1975 they show that jointness in production or nonconstant returns to scale cause implicit commodity prices to depend on both tastes and technology raising serious econometric difficulties in the estimation of commodity demand functions in addition since commodity prices become functions of the commodity bundle consumed the analogy to traditional demand theory breaks down joint production occurs when a good enters several production processes simultaneously or equivalently when a good in one production process also enters directly into the individual s utility function the most common example is time which provides the context for all production processes and is often associated with the production of several commodities simultaneously since joint production in the household is likely to be pervasive the critique by pollak and wachter cannot be ignored in response to the comment by william barnett pollak and wachter 1977 suggest dispensing with the notion of commodity prices and treating the demand for commodities as a function of goods prices this approach confounds tastes and technology but it eliminates the troublesome concept of commodity prices as parameters when in fact they are likely to be endogenous in this paper we show that results from positive analysis such as the critique by pollak and wachter have implications for the use of the household production framework for welfare analysis the household production function approach has had considerable appeal for measuring welfare effects of public actions in the environmental and natural resource areas gardner brown john charbonneau and michael hay elizabeth wilman yet traditional approaches to welfare measurement are frequently inapplicable we argue that welfare measurement in this framework is complicated by the difficulties of unravelling tastes and technology we extend pollak and wachter s results by demonstrating that marshallian demand functions for commodities cannot be uniquely defined thus marshallian functions cannot be used to derive exact compensated functions in the manner of jerry hausman and of george mckenzie and i f pearce nor can compensating and equivalent variation measures be bounded by marshallian consumer s surplus estimates following robert willig in fact duality results that normally allow us to move between marshallian and hicksian functions are not assistant and associate professors respectively department of agricultural and resource economics university of maryland college park md 20742 this paper is scientific article no a3404 contribution no 6476 of the maryland agricultural experiment station we wish to thank darrell hueth james opaluch v kerry smith and elizabeth wilman for comments on an earlier draft

poverty and famines an essay on entitlement and deprivation this book focuses on the causes of starvation in general and famines in particular the traditional analysis of famines is shown to be fundamentally defective and the author develops an alternative analysis

children and savings in less developed countries abstract a commonly cited motive for childbearing in ldcs is the support in old age provided by one s children alternative means of retirement support become available as a country develops this paper presents a simple two period model in which financial institutions are allowed to substitute for children in the provision of this service the quality of financial institutions is given an operational definition and the hypothesis of the model are tested on a cross section sample of countries

fairness stewardship and sustainable development abstract the welfare economic concept of fairness offers an attractive axiomatic foundation for the popular notion of stewardship fairness emphasizes the ex ante equal standing of all persons across and within generations this highlights the inextracability of poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability especially in the agrarian tropics where biodiversity loss deforestation and desertification are growing global concerns

the marginal efficiency effects of taxes and subsidies in the presence of externalities a computational general equilibrium approach abstract using 1983 data we develop a 19 sector computational general equilibrium model incorporating producer producer externalities and producer consumer externalities simulation results indicate that when additional government expenditure is financed by pigouvian taxes the marginal cost of public funds is substantially below one labor sales and output taxes also affect the output of the polluting industries and thus have indirect pigouvian effects which tend to reduce the associated marginal costs of public funds pigouvian taxes are usually more efficient than pigouvian subsidies since the tax revenue can be used to reduce other taxes

information access income distribution and the environmental kuznets curve abstract recent empirical studies have tested the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc focusing primarily on the relationship between per capita income and certain types of pollutant emissions given the stock nature of many pollution problems emissions only partially account for the environmental impacts moreover almost all of the studies have given consideration to little more than income levels as explanatory variables this paper empirically tests the hypothesis of the ekc existence for a stock sensitive indicator that is the percentage of protected area pa within national territory it does theorize that economic growth is a necessary condition in order to better address environmental issues but it also stresses that other variables income distribution education information accessibility may play a fundamental role in determining environmental quality contrary to other studies that mainly focus on the calculation of the income level corresponding to the transition point this paper is more concerned with the calculation of environmental quality corresponding to that transition point that is the minimum level of environmental quality that a country is willing to accept this paper highlights the idea that if the transition point is determined primarily by income level social policies determine the level of environmental quality corresponding to that point

correcting externalities through taxes on subsidies to related goods abstract optimal corrective taxation is considered in the presence of externalities in cases where only related goods i e complements to or substitutes for externality creating goods can be taxed in the context of identical individuals and separable externalities taxing and subsidizing complements and substitutes to externalities are analyzed first the circumstances under which it is optimal to operate on one market only for a related good are examined second cases are identified where optimality requires taxes on substitutes for or subsidies to complements to a good which generates negative externalities

environmental taxes with heterogeneous consumers an application to energy consumption in france abstract this paper constructs a model with four groups of households who have preferences over labor supply consumption of polluting energy related and non polluting non energy goods and emissions it quantifies the model for the french economy and computes its optimal tax equilibria under nine second best tax regimes we find that the redistributive role of environmental taxes requires the polluting goods to be taxed at a rate much below their marginal social damage these goods may even require an outright subsidy if the society values equality a lot secondly if environmental taxes that have an exclusively externality correcting role they benefit all types although the gains are rather modest the gains and losses become more substantial when environmental taxes have a redistributive role as well third setting the environmental tax at its pigouvian level rather than its optimal externality correcting cum redistributive level benefits the high income group at the expense of the low income groups fourth nonlinear taxation of polluting goods and nonlinear commodity taxation in general is a powerful redistributive mechanism fifth introducing environmental taxes in the current french tax system with its suboptimal income taxes results in substantial welfare gains for the highest income group and a sizable loss for the least well off persons

dual economic growth in poor tropical areas abstract we consider a two sector model a modern sector and an extensive one with the extensive sector being highly dependent on natural vegetation cover as a factor of production in the extensive sector land tenure is not well defined we show that taxing the extensive sector as a whole and land intensive crops relative to labor intensive crops increases real income consumption in the short run however necessarily falls the cost of the adjustment is paid mostly by the poor when the extensive sector as a whole is taxed the distributional consequences of taxing the land intensive outputs however are ambiguous

natural resources prices export policies and deforestation the case of sudan abstract environmental destruction is often the result of price policies for primary commodities that determine how individuals will use and abuse natural resources in this paper we analyze how domestic policies under colonial and independent governments in sudan contributed to acacia senegal deforestation and the demise of the international gum arabic trade when primary commodities are produced from environmentally beneficial species such as acacia senegal trees the impact of a declining market for the primary commodity will have economic and ecological repercussions on other sectors in the economy poverty and risk are central to this process

the effects of well management and the nature of the aquifer on groundwater resources we compare groundwater use under collective well management in china where village leaders allocate water among households and under private well management where farmers either pump from their own wells or buy water from wells owned by other farmers villages are divided into connected or isolated groups depending on whether there are lateral groundwater flows between aquifers underlying a village and neighboring ones in rural china households under collective well management use less water even under collective management households located in connected villages use more water indicating that the connectedness of the aquifers may undermine leaders incentives to conserve water

the structure of a contract and the theory of a non exclusive resource the process of arriving at a useful concept of analysis is not only slow and painful but also may go astray and attain nothing useful someone begins with one example or observation followed by a theory which is intuitively plausible a theoretical term associated with a vague concept is coined examples of a seemingly different type emerge which call for another theory the process goes on as examples and theories continue to accumulate the different categories under the same heading of analysis serve only to confuse and each associated theory becomes ad hoc such has been the fate of the concept of externality a more useful approach i think is via contractual conditions the example chosen for illustration is marine fisheries where the fishing right is taken

why truck distance taxes are contagious and drive fuel taxes to the bottom this paper analyzes the way in which countries with international and local truck traffic decide to switch from a simple fuel tax system to a dual system of fuel and distance charge taxes we show what drives a country to switch and how this affects the level of fuel taxes as well as incentives for other countries to also adopt the dual system the model is partially able to explain the gradual extension of kilometer charging for trucks in europe the model also shows that in the absence of diesel cars the gradual introduction of kilometer charges will make fuel taxation for trucks virtually disappear and will lead to a system where truck use is 1 taxed mainly based on distance 2 is taxed too heavily and 3 where highest distance taxes are expected in transit countries with a strong market position when the fuel tax must in addition serve as an externality tax for diesel cars the introduction of distance charges for trucks will give rise to diesel taxes that are lower than the external cost of diesel cars for trucks this leads to a sum of diesel taxes and distance charges that are higher than the external cost of trucks

a flexible assurance bonding system for improved environmental management abstract current methods of regulating activities that are known or suspected to be environmentally danaging are not working well they induce legal confrontation obfuscation and government intrusion into the inner workings of firms they tend to suppress technical and social innovation aimed at long term solutions they do not mesh well with the market signals that firms use to make decisions this paper discusses some of the underlying reasons for this problem and outlines a flexible environmental assurance bonding system designed to incorporate environmental criteria and uncertainty into the market system and to induce positive environmental technological innovation in addition to direct charges for known environmental damages an assurance bond equal to the current best estimate of the largest potential future environmental damages would be levied and kept in an interest bearing escrow account the bond plus a portion of the interest would be returned if and only if the firm could prove that the suspected damages had not occured or would not occur if damages did occur the bond would be used to rehabilitate or repair the environment and to compensate injured parties by requiring the users of environmental resources to post a bond adequate to cover potential future environmental damages with the possibility for refunds the burden of proof is shifted from the public to the resource user and a strong economic incentive is provided to research the true costs of environmentally innovative activities and to develop innovative cost effective pollution control technologies

reflections on the double dividend debate we survey the history of carbon taxation the range of market based instruments mbis of environmental control and the state of the double dividend debate in order to suggest directions for future research into mbis returning mbi revenues as lower distortionary taxes rather than as lump sums raises aggregate welfare but we favour mbis which raise little or no revenue for reasons of political acceptability to interest groups at the same time the overall case for any environmental improvement is weaker because of general equilibrium interactions with prior distortionary taxes research seems most necessary on quantifying the efficiency benefits of market control of heterogeneous polluters the benefits of environmental improvement the tax interaction effect and the various information costs of an mbi all on a case by case basis for different pollutants and places

green policies and public finance in a small open economy we explore the effects of greener preferences for the public finances employment and the domestic capital stock in a second best framework we find that greener preferences typically result in capital flight also employment declines despite the factor substitution that is induced by a lower tax on labour and a higher tax on natural resources if the uncompensated wage elasticity of labour supply is positive private utility declines public consumption in contrast may rise if most of the improvement in environmental quality occurs through a lower level rather than a cleaner composition of economic activity however if the labour supply curve bends backwards private utility rises while public consumption falls i introduction the deterioration of the natural environment constitutes one of the major challenges facing public policy today business groups are concerned that environmental protection induces both capital flight and major losses in private income environmental groups in contrast maintain that a more ambitious environmental policy may not impose large costs in particular environmental taxation may be attractive especially for the high tax countries of western and northern europe in these countries the

a pigovian rule for the optimum provision of public goods abstract the integrated treatment of optimal taxation and public expenditure presented here is based on the dual relationship between the prices of private goods and the quantities of public goods the conditions for optimum public good provision can be expressed as a modification of the samuelson conditions with extra terms representing a the distortionary effect of taxes on the willingness to pay for the public good and b distributional effects the former captures pigou s notion of the indirect damage caused by the need to finance public expenditure out of distortionary taxes and we call this the pigou term in certain cases a very simple benefit cost ratio for public projects emerges that is equivalent to measuring benefits as if they were taxed

structural estimation of congestion costs abstract we estimate a structural model of congestion costs using a bayesian nash equilibrium approach the individual s preference for traveling depends on the anticipated level of congestion which in turn is determined by travelers decisions of mobility the model is estimated using a french transportation household survey results confirm the presence of incomplete information and show that aversion to congestion is 6 6 lower during peak times than during off peak times a traveler s willingness to pay to save 1 min in traffic is estimated at 0 73 euros during peak times and 0 25 euros during off peak times

transport tax reform commuting and endogenous values of time abstract we consider a model of urban transport with two trip purposes commuting assumed perfectly complementary to labour supply and noncommuting to analyse the effects of transport tax reform on the value of time and marginal external congestion costs higher commuting taxes plausibly reduce time values but higher noncommuting transport prices will typically raise the value of time the intuition for this latter finding is that the reduction in congestion that follows from the tax increase itself raises net wages per hour of work inclusive of commuting time empirical illustrations with belgian data show a potentially large effect of transport tax reform on time values in quite a few of the tax reforms studied traffic levels are reduced but the increase in time values implies that marginal external congestion costs actually increase

technical change in agriculture and land degradation in developing countries a general equilibrium analysis this paper analyzes the role of economic linkages between upland agriculture lowland agriculture and other sectors in developing economies and the potential for welfare enhancing shifts from more to less erosive upland land use patterns comparative statics results are obtained from analytical and numerical general equilibrium models they indicate that the green revolution in lowland agriculture helped alleviate upland land degradation and that policies aimed at slowing land degradation through technical progress in upland crops may have the opposite of their intended effects the results highlight the need for integrated policy packages to reduce upland land degradation in developing countries

deprived land use intensification in shifting cultivation the population pressure hypothesis revisited this article provides a theoretical framework based on optimal control theory to analyze farm households land use intensification decisions in forest based shifting cultivation slash and burn agroecosystems the main results from the analysis generally coincide with the population pressure hypothesis pph as an important driver of soil degradation due to the so called fallow crisis or deprived land use intensification in shifting cultivation however the model also shows from a supply perspective that such a vicious circle of lower yields and greater forest land clearing may be avoided when the production elasticity of on farm labor outweighs the elasticity of substitution between farm labor and soil fertility furthermore using data from shifting cultivating households from yucatan mexico we calibrate the effect of changes in population density the numerical analysis suggests that by contrast to better off households when population density increases poorer shifting cultivating households optimal labor allocation strategy is to further extensify land use by clearing more forest in the village common property land or ejido land

second best pollution taxes and the structure of preferences we characterize optimal taxes on polluting and nonpolluting goods in ramsey and mirrlees second best environments the polluting good tax differs from the pigouvian tax by ramsey terms in the first and by stiglitz mirrlees plus another adjustment term in the second these terms can be positive negative or zero if preferences are weakly separable in public and private goods with the private good subutility weakly separable in labor and produced goods nonpolluting goods are taxed uniformly and the concept of a tax differential between polluting and nonpolluting goods is well defined the differential is then less than the pigouvian tax in the ramsey framework but it can be greater equal to or smaller than the pigouvian tax in the mirrlees second best in mirrlees second best if preferences are separable in labor supply and other goods the second best tax differential is identical to the pigouvian tax

sharecropping and the interlinking of agrarian markets one of the often noted features of less developed agrarian economies is the existence of interlinkages among the land labor credit and product markets the landlord is often the supplier of credit he frequently purchases and markets the output of the tenant farmers and often sells raw materials and even consumption goods to his tenant farmers how can this phenomenon be explained what are the welfare consequences of attempts to restrict these practices which often seem to constitute restraints on free trade these are the questions to which this paper is addressed a general set of arguments applicable to both competitive and noncompetitive environments are presented to situations where all the terms of the contract are determined in an optimal way as well as to situations where many of the terms are specified institutionally section i examines interlinked credit and tenancy contracts section ii examines interlinked marketing and tenancy contracts section iii points out the possible interlinking between labor contracts and consumption goods markets and section iv presents the different equilibrium frameworks discussed in the paper such as monopoly monopsony competition and equilibria with surplus labor

a behavioral model of timber supply abstract a dynamic behavioral model of timber supply is developed the diverse motivation of forest owners is recognized and the implications for optimal harvest patterns is explored this model is particularly relevant for the non industrial private forest nipf sector and has possible uses for public forest management properties of the optimal nipf timber supply curve are established and the effects of various taxes are examined to explore a more structured model simulations are conducted based upon data from a typical redwood region the projections provide indicative results for tax and other timber land policies these results are seen to depend crucially on the forms of the landowner s utility function and upon the function relating standing timber to non income outputs of the forest directions for needed empirical research are then indicated

on induced economic change in precapitalist societies abstract this essay explores a number of properties of a general growth model of induced economic change in precapitalist societies which incorporates both the insights of ester boserup and thomas malthus responses to diminishing returns include changes in work intensity and population growth some important variants of the model are also examined which focus on the transfer of production to non producers and on alternative processes by which change is induced the results are used to generate some parameters influencing the political stability of non working elites to criticize some previous less general growth models and to suggest some fruitful lines fot future empirical research on economic development in the long run

congestion tolling with agglomeration externalities abstract consider an urban economy with two types of externalities negative traffic congestion externalities and positive agglomeration externalities deriving from non market interaction suppose that urban travel can be tolled that non market interaction cannot be subsidized and that non market interaction is stimulated by a reduction in travel costs then the optimal toll is below the congestion externality cost this paper explores this line of reasoning

revenue recycling and the welfare effects of road pricing the authors explore the interaction between taxes on work related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market a congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in lump sum transfers the resulting efficiency loss in the labor market can be larger that the pigouvian efficiency gains from internalizing the congestion externality by contrast if congestion tax revenues are used to reduce labor taxes the net impact on the labor supply is positive and the efficiency gain in the labor market can raise the overall welfare gains of the congestion tax by as much as 100 percent recycling congestion tax revenues in public transit subsidies produces a positive but smaller impact on the labor supply in short the authors results indicate that the presence of preexisting tax distortions and the form of revenue recycling can crucially affect the size and possibly even the sign of the welfare effect of road pricing schemes the efficiency gains from recycling congestion tax revenues in other tax reductions can amount to several times the pigouvian welfare gains from congestion reduction

alleviating soil erosion pollution stock externalities alternative roles for government abstract this paper addresses two temporal externalities due to agriculture soil erosion and related pollution the possibility of decentralization of decisions the appropriate role of a resource manager and the efficiency of alternative policies are examined using traditional welfare economics concepts for a two sector model of rural urban linkage three alternative types of policies can be socially efficient but imply different involvement by government and have different knowledge requirements a pigouvian policy requires full information a bargaining solution involves government only in setting an entitlement but it may require too much knowledge by rural households in terms of understanding dynamic environmental relationships a third way is that government and rural households be co producers of environmental goods this concept assigns government the responsibility for maintaining knowledge about environmental relationships and government is a participant in a market system that determines prices for environmental related goods

ejido reforms in mexico conceptual issues and potential outcomes the evolving privatization of the ejido system in mexico represents a challenge to standard economic models of common property regimes these models tend to emphasize human interrelations while discounting the ecological conditions which form the environment for human interactions a risk spreading safety first model capturing interrelationships between nature and humans is developed to analyze the potential implications of mexico s privatization efforts recognizing that the majority of ejido lands are communal not parcelized located primarily in arid areas the model supports the prediction that privatization will occur and be most successful on irrigated ejido lands with modern social and economic infrastructure

transport taxes with multiple trip purposes a congestible urban transport system is considered in which cars and buses are used for commuting and non commuting trips commuting is a strict complement to taxable labour supply the optimal tax structure for raising a given amount of government revenue is examined for the cases where differentiation of transport tolls between trip purposes is and is not possible an application to belgian urban environments shows that optimal toll differentiation produces significant efficiency improvements without differentiation reforming transport taxes generates substantial gains only when the labour tax can be reduced

cleaning house new perspectives on households and economic development abstract this paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on households and economic development three related points are developed 1 household activities can be analyzed in economic terms particularly if these terms are broadly defined to encompass such factors as risk and uncertainty 2 significant differences between the economic position of men women and children within the patriarchal household mean that it cannot be treated as an undifferentiated unit of analysis 3 microeconomic analysis of the household must be situated within a larger structural analysis of gender and age based inequalities and their interaction with class structure and national position within the world capitalist system

reevaluating the first and the second dividends of environmental tax reforms abstract there is increasing global interest in market based climate change policies following the last elections in the united states in this context an exxon mobil chief executive came out in favour of a carbon tax this paper is concerned with the welfare analysis of environmental tax reforms etr and takes up the claims for the need of an unambiguous and operative definition of the double dividend both for empirical purposes and political advisement in this paper we contest the usual definition of the second dividend and its assimilation to an efficiency dividend we propose alternative definitions by suggesting a different splitting of the total welfare variation between the first and the second dividend in order to isolate the efficiency effects of the etr the new definitions become clearly understandable and easy for economic and policy interpretation concepts like weak and strong double dividend turn out to be unnecessary finally we analyze etr for the us economy to illustrate the advantages of the proposed definitions for policy implementation