There leave a variety of ways dealing with environmental problems, such as command and control driven by the government, private negotiation, and private law litigation. It is, however, not the right solution for preserving the nature mother because t...
There leave a variety of ways dealing with environmental problems, such as command and control driven by the government, private negotiation, and private law litigation. It is, however, not the right solution for preserving the nature mother because those steps are not curing the causes but just settling down the brawl between the two parties.
Nowadays, the governments, at home and abroad, use a wide spectrum of policy mechanism to curb the environmental degradation and set up a new plan for giving penalties against the source of pollution. Carbon tax, energy tax, sulphur tax, emission charge and waste charge are typical examples of green tax or environmental tax ,at this juncture.
The purpose of this article is to analyze the landscape of environmental tax system from the viewpoint of game theoretic mechanism, ie. a part of law and economics approach which stress the importance and the relationship between law and nonlegal mechanism of cooperation.
Law and economics approach is a and of interdisciplinary studies to see the legal problems tackling with the economic solution. The growth area in the recent torts literature has been the inclusion of friction in the standard accdent models either by relaxing the assumptions of perfect information or by making the legal system costly and/or unpredictable. Laws are not just arcane technical arguments; they are instruments for achieving important social goals.Inorder to know the effects of laws, judges and other lawmakers must have a method of evaluating laws' effects on important social values. Economics predicts the effects of policies on efficiency. Law is an obligation backed by a state sanction and economics provide a scientific theory to predict the effects of legal sanxtions on behavior. In a sense of game theory, tax system is a combined game of arbitration and signalling game and it suggests that formal contract is more effective than multilateral consensus. To reflect the moving situation of technological developments and dynamic policy target, evolutionary mechanism is to be scrutinized.
From mechanism concept oriented view, so called, environmental tax in a broad sense, leaves loopholes in information symmetry. Environmental tax system does not provide a true signal reporting incentive mechanism by signal senders. It is just giving penalties against polluters now knowing the exact level of polluter's economic benefit by polluting the environment. As time goes, under this kind of tax system, companies have no incentive to preserve or to improve the environment technology and just they have incentives to evade the penalties or to hide their true information of pollution.
Therefore, it requires a series of considerations in building and operating environmental tax system. First, a part of environmental surtax should reinvest in improving environment and in continuing education program. Second, evolution mechanism is need to recognize the more favorable incentive of true reporting rather than that of false reporting. Third, Green budget reform is also required to set up the environmental tax system, revenue neutrality and double charge problem considered. And the last, TCMP(Taxpayer's Compliance Measurement Program) should be introduced in operating the environmental information system to get the reasonable penalty equivalent to the benefit from polluting the environment.