Economic tax reform: Shifting the tax burden from economic goods to environmental bads

Abstract

It is increasingly recognised that 'end-of-pipe' environmental policies which limit environmental impact are not sufficient. Instead, 'along-the-pipe' policies are needed which will change the overall patterns of economic activity in order to preclude environmental damage. As this paper discusses, Eco-Tax Reform has the potential to deliver pervasive change, not only to protect the environment, but also to encourage the provision of employment and even to enhance overall competitivity.

Market Environmentalism, New Environmental Policy Instruments, and Climate Policy in the United Kingdom and Germany

“…Although this closed and conservative bureaucratic culture has occasionally been blown open by issues like BSE (Jasanoff 2005) and foot-and-mouth disease, the preference for scientific clarity provides one explanation for U.K. civil servants' and politicians' openness to environmental economics, a discipline that proffered, in its own terms, a new paradigm in environmental policy (Baumol and Oates 1988;Folmer et al 2001). For the Conservative government of the 1980s and 1990s, MBIs nevertheless sat uneasily with its commitments to tax reduction, notwithstanding emergent ideas on ecological tax reform (Gee and von Weizsäcker 1994). 2 The publication of the Pearce Report in 1989 led to several upbeat pronouncements on the merits of MBIs, yet few were actually introduced (Pearce, Markyanda, and Barbier 1989;Jordan, Wurzel, and Zito 2003b).…”