Can international commodity tax harmonisation be pareto-improving when governments supply public goods?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lockwood, B
• 署名单位: University of Exeter; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/S0022-1996(96)01478-X
• 发表日期: 1997
• 页码: 387-408
• 关键词: commodity tax reform; tax harmonisation

摘要

This paper investigates whether it is possible to find Pareto-improving commodity tax reforms that harmonise taxes between two countries when governments supply public goods and thus have revenue requirements. We consider a Ricardian model of trade with elastic factor supply, and suppose that initial taxes are Nash equilibrium ones. Under weak conditions, a necessary and sufficient condition for a tax reform to be Pareto improving is that it increases the value of compensated (utility constant) demand for imports in both countries. A two-good example suggests that harmonisation is unlikely to be Pareto-improving if the revenue requirement is high, and the demand for imports is relatively price elastic, in both countries. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.