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...

Fat, sugar or sweetened beverage taxes are part of an overall public health nutrition approach to healthy eating. They are not approaches that on their own are likely to bring about change. Policy evidence from existing food tax implementation suggest that taxes need to be paralleled by subsidies and other interventions to encourage healthy eating. Such dual methods help not only contribute to ...

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 ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of food taxes and subsidies on diet, body weight and health through a systematic review of the literature. METHODS We searched the English-language published and grey literature for empirical and modelling studies on the effects of monetary subsidies or taxes levied on specific food products on consumption habits, body weight and chronic conditions. Empirical st...