We compare the choice between granting subsidies to the automotive industry and using the funds instead to implement a permanent reduction in the sales tax on capital goods, one of Ontario’s most distortionary taxes. Our results depend critically upon how workers respond to the withdrawal of...

Alberta’s public finances depend upon volatile revenues from an exhaustible resource base. The question arises of what proportion of current resource revenues the government should spend on current priorities and what proportion it should save for future generations. The paper uses the...

We test whether the principle of targeting (alternatively Sandmo’s (1975) additivity property and Kopczuk’s (2003) decomposition involving the Pigovian rule) has relevance for environmental taxation in a second best world consisting of an exogenous revenue requirement and pre-existing...

Carbon taxes or tradable permit systems to address climate change may induce research and development in energy-related technologies. We construct a single-knowledge-stock model of R&D, growth and climate to assess the importance of this effect. The contribution of induced R&D is shown to be...

We assess the extent to which subsidies for home energy efficiency improvements in Canada have been paid to households that would have undertaken the improvements anyway – the so-called free rider rate. We focus on forced-air natural gas furnaces, replaced between April 1, 2007 and March 31,...

Optimal choices of border tax adjustments (BTA) – tariffs or subsidies on imports and exports – are derived for a coalition of countries working cooperatively to abate greenhouse gas emissions, under an exogenous emissions reduction target. Under a domestic target, the optimal BTA is...