The marginal cost of public funds in the EU: the case of labour versus green taxes

Salvador Barrios (), Jonathan Pycroft and Bert Saveyn

No 35, Taxation Papers from Directorate General Taxation and Customs Union, European Commission

Abstract: One key objective of tax-based fiscal consolidations which is too often disregarded in public debate is to minimise economic distortions. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to gauge these potential distortions by calculating the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) for EU member states. We consider two specific tax categories which are often proposed as good candidates for efficiency-enhancing tax shifting policies: labour and green taxes. Our analysis suggests that the economic distortions provoked by labour taxes are significantly larger than for green taxes. This result suggests that a green-taxes oriented fiscal consolidation would be preferred to a labour-tax oriented one (assuming that both tax increases would yield the same tax revenues). This holds for all EU member states modelled and despite the fact that potential welfare enhancement through pollution abatement are cancelled-out. Nevertheless, this result is slightly less strong when one considers the spillover effects between countries, which are more pronounced (in relative terms) for green taxes. This suggests that the use of green taxes for fiscal consolidation would be more effective were there to be close coordination across EU countries. In addition the efficiency losses associated with labour taxes are also likely to be greater when labour markets are less flexible (from an efficiency-wage perspective), a result also found to a small extent for green taxes. This raises the possibility that undertaking structural reforms (especially in the labour market) would help to minimize the efficiency losses entailed by tax-driven fiscal consolidations.

Keywords: European Union; Taxation; labour taxation; environment; marginal cost public funds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H21 H23 H24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-eec, nep-env, nep-eur, nep-pbe, nep-reg and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxati ... tion_paper_35_en.pdf final version, 2013 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/resources/documents/taxation/gen_info/economic_analysis/tax_papers/taxation_paper_35_en.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/sites/taxation/files/resources/documents/taxation/gen_info/economic_analysis/tax_papers/taxation_paper_35_en.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/resources/documents/taxation/gen_info/economic_analysis/tax_papers/taxation_paper_35_en.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tax:taxpap:0035

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Taxation Papers from Directorate General Taxation and Customs Union, European Commission Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gaetan Nicodeme () and Ana Xavier () and Ioana Diaconescu ().