Are User Fees Really Regressive?

George Economides and Apostolis Philippopoulos

No 3875, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper studies the aggregate and distributional implications of introducing user fees for publicly provided excludable public goods into a model with consumption and income taxes. The setup is a neoclassical growth model where agents differ in earnings and second-best policy is chosen by a Ramsey government. Our main result is that the adoption of user fees by the Ramsey government not only increases aggregate efficiency, but it also decreases inequality. This result is in contrast to common view and policy practice.

Keywords: user fees; Ramsey taxation; efficiency; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 H20 H40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3875.pdf (application/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:ces:ceswps:_3875

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().