作者:Timothy Taylor @ 2015-11-06
译者:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 校对:龙泉(@L_Stellar) 二校:慕白(@李凤阳他说)
来源:Conversable Economist,http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-window-tax-tale-of-excess-burden.html
For economists, the “excess burden” of a tax refers to the idea that the cost of a tax isn’t just the amount of money collected–it’s also the ways in which taxpayers alter their behavior because the tax has changed their incentives. A moderately well-known classroom and textbook example is the “window tax,” first imposed in England in 1696 by King William III, and not definitively repealed until 1851. The excess burden of the window tax was that lower-income people ended up living in rooms with few or no windows.
Wallace E. Oates and Robert M. Schwab review the history of the window tax and provide actual estimates of how it affected the number of windows per house in their article, “The Window Tax: A Case Study in Excess Burden,” which appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I have toiled in the fields as Managing Editor since 1987).
Wallace E. Oates 和Robert M. Schwab在《经济展望杂志》(2015/冬)的《窗户税:超额负担之案例分析》一文中回顾了窗户税历史,并给出了其影响家庭平均窗户数的估测值(我自1987年起担任杂志总编)。
The article popped back into my mind earlier this week when I learned that Oates, a highly distinguished economist based at the University of Maryland since 1979, died last week. One of Oates’s specialties was the area of local public finance, and his 1972 book on Fiscal Federalism, is a classic of that subfield.
前几天,我听说Oates已于上周去世,心里不禁又浮现起这篇文章。这位卓越的经济学家自1979年起一直任教于马里兰大学。他擅长的领域之一是地方公共财政,其1972年出版的《财政联邦主义》正是这一领域中的经典。
Here are some facts about the historical window tax, courtesy of Oates and Schwab.
下面引用Oates与Schwab写到的一些历史。
Oates and Schwab work with a mix of data on the number of windows in a sample of houses in Shropshire and economic theory about household behavior when confronted with taxes to generate an admittedly rough estimate that on average, collecting a certain amount of money through the window tax created an excess burden–in terms of the costs of living in a place with fewer windows–equal to an additional 62% of the value of the tax.
Oates和Schwab将什普罗郡样本住宅的窗户数据和面对个税居民行为经济理论结合起来,得出一个粗略的估计:整体说来,因窗户税那笔钱产生的超额负担——就人们选择住在窗户较少的住所这一行为成本而言——相当于税赋的62%。
Oates and Schwab ask why the window tax lasted so long, give its many problems, and offer an appropriately cynical answer: “Perhaps the lesson here is that when governments need to raise significant revenue, even a very bad tax can survive for a very long time.”
既然窗户税问题如此之多,Oates和Schwab就追问为何它能持续如此之久。他们给出的回答是一种恰到好处的冷嘲:“也许,此处的教益就是,如果政府需要显著增加收入,那么即便是极为恶性的税种也能存活很长一段时间。”
I didn’t know Oates personally, but I had one other job-related interaction with him back. Along with his work in local public finance, Oates was also well-known as an environmental economist. His 1975 book, The Theory of Environmental Policy (written with William Baumol) was highly influential in setting the direction of what at the time was a fairly new and growing field.
我私下里和Oates并无深交,但之前曾因工作关系和他有过另外一次互动。除了在地方公共财政领域的成绩以外,Oates还以环境经济学家的身份知名。他1975年的著作《环境经济理论与政策设计》(与William Baumol合著)影响极大,为当时这个相当年轻、正在成长的领域设定了方向。
In 1995, Oates was a co-author in one of the most downloaded and cited exchanges the JEP has ever published on the subject of what is sometimes called the “Porter hypothesis.”
1995年,以人称的“波特假说”为主题,Oates与人合作,为《经济学展望杂志》写了一篇文章,成为该刊史上下载和引用得最多的文章之一。
Michael Porter made the argument–bolstered by a large number of case studies, that when environmental goals are set in a strict way, but firms are allowed flexibility in how to achieve those goals in the context of a competitive market environment, firms often become quite innovative in meeting those environmental goals.
以大量案例研究为支撑,迈克尔·波特提出了如下论点:当环境目标被严格设定且企业在竞争中可以灵活发挥时,企业为达成这些目标通常会变得富有创造性。
Indeed, Porter argued that in a substantial number of cases, the innovations induced by the tough new environmental rules save enough money so that the rules end up imposing no economic costs at all. In the Fall 1995 Journal of Economic Perspectives, Michael E. Porter and Claas van der Linde make their case in “Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship,”(9:4, 97-118).
事实上,波特认为,在相当多的案例中,由严厉的环保新规所引发的创新能够省出足够的款项,使得这些规定最终不增加任何经济成本。在《经济展望杂志》1995/秋,波特和Claas van der Linde通过《环境/竞争力关系新概念一探》(9:4, 97-118)一文对此作了论述。
The authorial team of Karen Palmer, Wallace E. Oates, and Paul R. Portney respond in “Tightening Environmental Standards: The Benefit-Cost or the No-Cost Paradigm?” (9:4, 119-132). Oates and his co-authors took the position that while the costs of complying with environmental regulations do often turn out to be lower than industry predictions that were made when the rule was under discussion, it goes too far to say that environmental rules usually or generally don’t impose costs. I wrote about some more recent evidence on this dispute in “Environmental Protection and Productivity Growth: Seeking the Tradeoff” (January 8, 2015).
Karen Palmer、Wallace E. Oates和Paul R. Portney用《强化环保标准:收益/成本范式还是零成本范式?》(9:4, 119-132)一文做出回应。Oates和共同作者们的立场是:尽管遵守环保规制的成本最终总会低于起初制定时的业界预测,但却不能说它往往或一般情形下不会增加成本。我曾就此讨论提供了一些最新佐证,见《环境保护与生产率增长:寻找权衡》一文(2015-01-08)
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