Suchergebnisse

In conducting economic policy, governments generally face conflicts in various objectives, e.g. between efficiency and equity. In Norway, one objective of energy politics has been to reduce electricity consumption, and several tax increases have been proposed. Whether this objective may be in conflict with objectives of efficiency and equity is the focus in this paper. We discuss the effects on household behaviour of three different electricity tax schemes, one proportional and two non-linear. For each household we estimate the reduction in household electricity consumption. As measures of distributional effects and efficiency effects we estimate compensating variation and excess tax burden from the tax schemes. We find that the non-linear tax scheme targeting high electricity consumption is most preferred in order to reduce consumption and least preferred concerning the objective of minimizing excess tax burden. When considering distributional effects, the ranking of tax schemes depends on the weight placed on different household groups.

There is confusion in the literature concerning the relationship between income inequality and redistribution in a cross-country perspective. The reason for this is that different contributions in the literature are not referring to the same characteristic. This is shown by addressing information about redistribution in an international context from a number of angles: the size measures, such as tax revenue and government spending, the progressivity and redistributive effect with which the size is financed on the tax side, and the redistributional effects of government spending. By employing micro data from the Luxembourg Income Study database in combination with more aggregated information from the OECD for 15 countries, we show that the answer to the question 'does more income inequality generate more redistribution?' depends on how the concept of redistribution is operationalized. Moreover, we argue that closer attention should be given to the common-base version of redistribution, which uses the 'transplant-and-compare' procedure of Dardanoni and Lambert (2002). This conceptualization of redistribution is in fact what many authors actually may have in mind when discussing the relationship between income inequality and redistribution.