Behavioral and Distributional Effects of Environmental Policy
Carlo Carraro and Gilbert E. Metcalf
Abstract
Most people would agree that it makes sense to tax a company that pollutes in a way that directly reflects the amount of environmental and social damage it has done. Yet in practice, such taxes are fraught with difficulty and have far-reaching implications. A company facing a new tax may lay off workers, for example, exacerbating an unemployment problem. This volume focuses on such external issues and examines in detail the trade-offs involved in designing policies to deal with environmental problems. Reflecting the broad nature of the subject, the contributors include leading economists in th ... More
Most people would agree that it makes sense to tax a company that pollutes in a way that directly reflects the amount of environmental and social damage it has done. Yet in practice, such taxes are fraught with difficulty and have far-reaching implications. A company facing a new tax may lay off workers, for example, exacerbating an unemployment problem. This volume focuses on such external issues and examines in detail the trade-offs involved in designing policies to deal with environmental problems. Reflecting the broad nature of the subject, the contributors include leading economists in the areas of public finance, industrial organization, and trade theory, as well as environmental economists. Integrating both theoretical and empirical methods, they examine environmental policy design as it relates to location decisions, compliance costs, administrative costs, effects on research and development, and international factor movements.
Keywords:
taxes,
environmental damage,
social damage,
unemployment,
public finance,
industrial organization,
trade theory,
environmental policy,
location decisions,
compliance costs
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2000 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226094816 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: February 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226094809.001.0001 |
