Talk:Pigouvian tax

message: Author of article needs to provide more clarity for assertions based on Pigou's The Economics of Welfare. Broad cites to a 800+ page text are not helpful or authoritative.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.205.132.193 (talk) 19:32, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pincites to Pigou 

message: The topic paragraph of this article is pretty much incomprehensible.  Full of jargon.  What are "externalities," for example.  Please rewrite!
192.249.47.201 (talk) 18:50, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Did you read the linked article "externality" which explains the term? Mindmatrix 20:46, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Do we have to read every article in order to understand any article?  I'm going to put something in. OsamaBinLogin (talk) 16:49, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incomprehensible 

message: Does this page maintain a neutral tone throughout? Particularly the subheading regarding political obstacles?
71.59.147.83 (talk) 01:09, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neutral tone? 

message: do you really say "pig-ovian"?  At first I thought the word derived from the word 'pig', as in a barnyard animal.  OK, "Arthur Pigou".  Did he really survive grammar school with a last name pronounced "pig-oo"?  Or is it more like pizhou? OsamaBinLogin (talk) 16:49, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: When I was an undergrad, my professors pronounced his name as "PEE-goo." I've heard worse. "PI-zheu" would be a French, rather than Brit, pronunciation. CountryMama27 (talk) 19:33, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  pronunciation 

message: In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax#No_intervention_.28direct_negotiation_between_parties.29
there should be a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 181.29.131.116 (talk) 01:58, 13 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to Coase theorem 

message: Sumptuary tax redirects here, yet the term does not appear in the text. 216.8.172.35 (talk) 21:18, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sumptuary tax 

message: Dr. Franckx has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:
We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.
Dr. Franckx has published scholarly research which seems to be relevant to this Wikipedia article:
*Reference : Laurent Franckx & Alessio DAmato, Isabelle Brose & Isabelle Brose, 2004. "Multi Pollutant Yardstick Schemes as Environmental Policy Tools," Energy, Transport and Environment Working Papers Series ete0416, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centrum voor Economische Studien, Energy, Transport and Environment.
ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 02:42, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dr. Franckx's comment on this article 

message: The only focus seems to be on how a higher price cuts output by implied lower demand.
But the real action of a pigovian tax is in the substitution of cleaner alternatives.
Coal costs 1 while natural gas costs 1.4 for the same resulting output but at half the pollution, so a tax of 1 per unit of pollution will make coal cost 2 while natural gas costs 1.9. Not only does the higher price cut demand per unit of energy, it also cuts demand for coal while increasing demand for gas. But if wind costs 1.8 with no pollution, then it will cut demand for gas which can quickly track varying wind production, so coal demand is cut while gas production capacity is increased but gas burned is cut if wind is available. Coal demand is eliminated even though wind and natural gas cost more without the pollution tax.
Currently, coal costs 1 while natural gas in areas of high supply, meaning pipelines, gas costs .8 while in areas lacking pipeline capacity, gas costs 1.2, except natural gas generation is faster to build and more versatile and thus has lower capital cost than coal (or nuke, hydro, wind). That's why gas gained and coal fell even before gas became cheaper than coal in some markets - price is more for a given transaction, but capital costs must be spread over many transactions.
Remember, economists must use both hands, on one hand ..., but on the other hand ....
Mulp (talk) 03:14, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are there no papers discussing the substitution effect? 

message: The point of strict regulatory isn't efficiency per se, it is determining a safe level of pollution and enforcing it uniformly. The healthy level of smoke is fixed, independent of the total damage it does to neighbors. Note that excess pollution isn't only a nuisance; it can be lethal. In such case, the aggrieved party can't collect a fee because he is dead. 
The real issue isn't the number of neighbors, it's the number of factories. With one factory, only limited pollution controls are necessary. (The 1948 Donora smog event proved even one factory is enough to be fatal.) Assertions of inefficiency when regulations are applied to total industrial pollution are not well founded by the arguments presented here. The solution isn't to limit the total number of factories, it's to improve the pollution controls on the individual ones. Yes, this decreases the total market in number of goods, though it increases the market in pollution control.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.100.123.107 (talk) 15:38, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reciprocal cost discussion is dubious 

message: If manufacturing has an associated negative externality of pollution, and so manufacturing is taxed to include the cost of the pollution as a cost of manufacturing to get the market price of the manufactured goods where it belongs... but the government then spends the tax receipts on education: yes, you've mitigated the pollution level somewhat, but you still have a level of pollution, pollution that is now an economic byproduct of education. You need to spend the tax receipts to clean up the pollution or you have not corrected the externality. Wish I had a citation for you, but this is how it works. 98.7.201.234 (talk) 16:07, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  spending the tax receipts on mitigation? 

message: "Economist Ronald Coase argued that individuals can come to an agreement with an efficient result without the need for a third party when transaction costs are low."
This section seems to support a misreading of The Problem of Social Cost. The point of the paper is that because transaction costs are large enough and property rights are ambiguous that you don't see this in practice.I'd maybe rewrite this as "Economist Ronald Coase argued that when transaction costs are low individuals can come to an agreement with an efficient result without the need for a third party."to emphasize this point better. A more extensive rewrite might be warranted.--TheWhiteGuar (talk) 02:10, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Coase Theorem 

message: To call a vacant property (or empty homes) tax can for Pigouvian requires some more justification.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Northwind Arrow (talk • contribs) 11:07, 26 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vacant property (or empty homes) tax 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: moved. Per consensus. (closed by non-admin page mover) – robertsky (talk) 13:59, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Pigovian tax →  – "Pigouvian" is more common in Google Ngram Viewer long-term although only slightly so recently; also, the economist is called "Pigou" so "Pigovian" seems to make less sense; double check: Britannica has "Pigouvian"; general Google search has more "Pigouvian" than "Pigovian"; in Google Scholar, "Pigouvian" is a clear winner. Dan Polansky (talk) 08:43, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

text: it was actually more like a merge than a cut-and-paste move, as there were versions of both articles from before the merge: . We could argue that the latter (the original history of the current page) is lower in content, but probably best just to use the  and  tags to preserve the history on both sides. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 14:52, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 16 November 2022 

message: I've got a Masters in Economics and I found the first paragraph unreadable.  Not "unreadable" but "not able to be digested in 4 seconds to refresh my knowledge of the definition".   
The lead paragraph needs to be understandable to non-economists.  If you need a target audience, imagine a politician who heard the term from an economist and wants to know what it is.  It should be short and simple and jargon free.  (Or as little jargon as possible.)  I started to write one and ran out of time.  Here's what I got so far:    
A Pigouvian tax (also spelled Pigovian tax) is a tax on a product (or service) with a negative externality.  The tax lessens the amount of product (or service) purchased and, therefore, lessens the negative externality.  For example, cigarettes cause lung cancer, so a tax on cigarettes would mean fewer cigarettes get purchased and fewer people get lung cancer..  A good pigouvian tax includes the exact cost of the negative externality in the purchase, making the market efficient.
Mdnahas (talk) 15:43, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed this is still the case. So let's clean it up bit by bit. I also think the comments from Dr. Franckx, though I'm not familiar with his work, are quite valid. Simplifying and narrowing the scope of this article and allowing some of the other points to perhaps be moved to their own article(s) would be important first steps. I found the article to be both messy organizationally and grammatically with run-on sentences and tangental points. CountryMama27 (talk) 19:37, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  First paragraph too jargon heavy and not understandable