Environmental taxes and productivity: Lessons from Canadian manufacturing

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Yamazaki, Akio
• 署名单位: National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104560
• 发表日期: 2022
• 关键词: Environmental tax; Revenue-recycling; Manufacturing; PRODUCTIVITY

摘要

This paper investigates how environmental taxes affect manufacturing productivity by examining British Columbia's revenue-neutral carbon tax. I develop a new hypothesis, the Productivity Dividend Hypothesis, to show that environmental taxes can positively affect productivity by recycling tax revenues to reduce corporate income taxes. This revenue-recycling increases investment and could raise productivity more than environmental taxes lower productivity by diverting resources from production. I evaluate this hypothesis using detailed confidential plant-level data. I find that the carbon tax lowers productivity, although this is offset to some extent by the revenue-recycling. For some plants, the policy generates a net gain in productivity.