Gasoline taxes vary widely among industrialized countries, as does support for the United Nations' effort to curtail the use of fossil fuels to address the climate change problem. We argue that malapportionment of the electoral system affects both the rate at which governments tax gasoline and...

Tax policy often breeds controversy, especially when rate changes are motivated by volatile resource sectors. This paper examines how provincial tax policies respond to changes in resource revenues. Specifically, it (i) estimates the "tax-resource" elasticity for Canadian provinces and (ii)...

Zambia has changed its mineral tax regime repeatedly during the past decades in a bid to raise mineral revenue, but with only modest success. This paper looks at what the country needs to do to create a mining fiscal regime that could sustain operations, boost output, and raise revenues without...

We explore the efficacy of price and quantity controls in a dynamic set up in which the decisions of some agents are irreversible. We demonstrate that the assumption of irreversibility improves the performance of a tax relative that of a system of tradable quotas and significantly alters the...

This paper examines pollution and foreign-capital tax policies on the host country?s welfare when foreign-investment tax credits are absent or present in the source country. In the absence of tax credits, the optimal policy is a pollution tax with a foreign-investment tax or subsidy. The...

This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

Die Steuer- und Finanzpolitik legt die Grundlagen für eine erfolgreiche Aufgabenerfüllung des Staates. Wie wird in den nächsten Jahren die Steuer- und Finanzpolitik gestaltet werden? Wo liegen die Probleme? Wo sehen Wissenschaft, Handwerk und Politik Handlungsbedarf? Um diese Fragen zu...

In der April-Umfrage des ifo World Economic Survey (WES) wurden die Teilnehmer nach ihrer Einschätzung der durch die US-Reformen der Steuer- und Handelspolitik angestoßenen Veränderungen befragt. Eine deutliche Mehrheit der Befragungsteilnehmer geht davon aus, dass die Änderungen der...

Facing very modest GDP growth in Germany in 2001 and 2002, it is investigated if potential output will – as usually expected – grow by 1.5 to 2.0 percent until 2005. The incentives to work and to invest and their changes in the nineties are analyzed. Given the foreseeable changes of these...