Commodity Taxation and Social Welfare: The Generalized Ramsey Rule

David Coady () and Jean Drèze

International Tax and Public Finance, 2002, vol. 9, issue 3, 295-316

Abstract: Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best general equilibrium framework, which leads to the “generalized Ramsey rule” for optimum taxation. We show how many standard results on optimum taxation and tax reform have a straightforward counterpart in this general framework. Using this framework, we also try to clarify the notion of “deadweight loss,” as well as the relation between alternative distributional assumptions and the structure of optimum taxes. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2002

Keywords: commodity taxation; efficiency; redistribution; shadow prices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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DOI: 10.1023/A:1016240915589

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