Many researchers have argued that environmental tax can reduce the distortion of some taxes such as labor tax by its revenue recycling effect. However, Bovenberg and Mooij (1995) and Parry (1995) cast doubt on this argument. Their reasoning was such t...
Many researchers have argued that environmental tax can reduce the distortion of some taxes such as labor tax by its revenue recycling effect. However, Bovenberg and Mooij (1995) and Parry (1995) cast doubt on this argument. Their reasoning was such that environmental tax can aggravate labor market distortion by tax interdependency effect between the environmental tax and distortionary taxes, even though the distortion of the labor tax is reduced because of the environmental tax.
In contrast, Hettich (1998) pointed out that environmental tax reform can boost economic growth by stimulating studying to accumulate human capital and by reducing non-environmental taxes. However, Fullerton and Kim (2006) analyzed that Hettich's argument may not be substantiated if income tax is large enough and/or pollution efficiency is low enough. On the other hand, under certain conditions, they further contended that revenue neutral environmental tax reform can stimulate economic growth.
In this study, by extending the model proposed by Fullerton and Kim (2006), I explored the tax interdependency effect among environmental, labor, and income taxes in order to examine the relationship between environmental tax and economic growth. The theoretical model shows that environmental tax cannot always stimulate economic growth if other taxes such as labor or income tax are distorted when environmental tax rate is increased. However, it is possible that environmental tax boosts economic growth when cutting distortionary taxes is enough to offset the distortion of taxes induced by environmental tax, or improvement of abatement knowledge can sufficiently reduce the cost of production.
I have also performed empirical analysis using 14 OECD countries, which have introduced environmental tax reform policy. The main results are as follows. First, regression analysis shows that there is a statistically significant relationship between the increase of implicit energy tax rate and the increase of implicit income tax rate. Meanwhile, empirical analysis does not provide enough evidence to claim that implicit tax rate increase brings about labor tax decrease. We can presume that environmental tax reform policy in Europe did not necessarily mitigate the tax burden of labor or income tax.
Second, European experiences show that environmental tax, in fact, did not stimulate economic growth. This result shows that environmental tax reform policy does not guarantee economic growth when the introduction of environmental tax causes distortion of other conventional taxes.