Pub Date : 2023-04-17DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16795569226712
Yahya Alshamy, Christopher J. Coyne, Nathan P. Goodman, Garrett Wood
Contrary to predictions by many experts, Ukraine’s military has been resilient in the face of the Russian government’s invasion. Drawing on the logic of polycentric defense, this article helps explain how Ukraine has remained resistant against a conventionally more powerful adversary. We argue that polycentric defense in Ukraine has four benefits that aid counteroffensive efforts against invasion. First, polycentric defense facilitates the use of local and context-specific knowledge. Second, it permits competition, experimentation, and flexibility. Third, it reduces single-point failure vulnerabilities. Fourth, it encourages a wide variety of individuals to join the armed forces and contribute to the war effort. We present evidence of the benefits of polycentric defense in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
{"title":"Polycentric defense, Ukraine style: explaining Ukrainian resilience against invasion","authors":"Yahya Alshamy, Christopher J. Coyne, Nathan P. Goodman, Garrett Wood","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16795569226712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16795569226712","url":null,"abstract":"Contrary to predictions by many experts, Ukraine’s military has been resilient in the face of the Russian government’s invasion. Drawing on the logic of polycentric defense, this article helps explain how Ukraine has remained resistant against a conventionally more powerful adversary. We argue that polycentric defense in Ukraine has four benefits that aid counteroffensive efforts against invasion. First, polycentric defense facilitates the use of local and context-specific knowledge. Second, it permits competition, experimentation, and flexibility. Third, it reduces single-point failure vulnerabilities. Fourth, it encourages a wide variety of individuals to join the armed forces and contribute to the war effort. We present evidence of the benefits of polycentric defense in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":"178 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136021710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16717078287437
Daniel Kuehn
This article explores James M. Buchanan’s contributions to urban economics and urban public finance. Buchanan never self-identified as an ‘urban economist’, so his contributions to the field have blended into his broader body of work on public finance and externalities. However, in a series of papers in the 1960s and 1970s, Buchanan developed an urban fiscal club framework for thinking about urban problems that he used to analyse cities’ tax policy and the negative externalities of congestion, crime and pollution. By drawing out those ideas and their relation to each other, we can reconstruct Buchanan as an urban economist. This reconstruction casts new light on Buchanan’s service with several academic and federal urban policy commissions, including the Committee on Urban Public Expenditures and Richard Nixon’s Task Force on Urban Affairs and Task Force on Model Cities. Buchanan’s interest in urban economics has roots in an often-ignored member of his dissertation committee, Harvey Perloff. Perloff’s joint appointment with the Chicago Planning Program brought Buchanan into contact with several urban planners and urban economists who would continue to engage him in urban policy work throughout his career.
{"title":"James M. Buchanan as an urban economist","authors":"Daniel Kuehn","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16717078287437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16717078287437","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores James M. Buchanan’s contributions to urban economics and urban public finance. Buchanan never self-identified as an ‘urban economist’, so his contributions to the field have blended into his broader body of work on public finance and externalities. However, in a series of papers in the 1960s and 1970s, Buchanan developed an urban fiscal club framework for thinking about urban problems that he used to analyse cities’ tax policy and the negative externalities of congestion, crime and pollution. By drawing out those ideas and their relation to each other, we can reconstruct Buchanan as an urban economist. This reconstruction casts new light on Buchanan’s service with several academic and federal urban policy commissions, including the Committee on Urban Public Expenditures and Richard Nixon’s Task Force on Urban Affairs and Task Force on Model Cities. Buchanan’s interest in urban economics has roots in an often-ignored member of his dissertation committee, Harvey Perloff. Perloff’s joint appointment with the Chicago Planning Program brought Buchanan into contact with several urban planners and urban economists who would continue to engage him in urban policy work throughout his career.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":"141 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136121333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Efforts supporting domestic revenue mobilisation in developing countries are often designed and evaluated based on empirical indicators, such as ratios of revenue to gross domestic product, which capture differences in achieved outcomes across countries. This article studies a complementary approach that also takes into account differences in countries’ fundamental economic structures associated with different capacities to raise revenue, which are not captured by simple ratios of revenue to gross domestic product. Non-parametric data envelopment analysis is applied to estimate domestic revenue potential in a panel of 118 low- and middle-income countries from 2008 to 2019. This approach provides a data-driven measure of how efficient each country is in raising domestic revenue given its national economic conditions. The results indicate that countries’ relative efficiencies do not exhibit the same strongly positive correlation with income levels as typically observed for ratios of revenue to gross domestic product. Instead, countries with low efficiency are spread across all income groups and geographical regions. This suggests that looking solely at ratios of revenue to gross domestic product might be misleading for drawing policy and normative conclusions about how much more revenue a country should aim to raise. Finally, panel regression analysis is used to investigate the extent to which international support is targeted at countries with larger untapped revenue potential.
{"title":"Measuring untapped revenue potential in developing countries: cross-country frontier and panel data analysis","authors":"Željko Bogetić, Dominik Naeher, Raghavan Narayanan","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16613592544147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16613592544147","url":null,"abstract":"Efforts supporting domestic revenue mobilisation in developing countries are often designed and evaluated based on empirical indicators, such as ratios of revenue to gross domestic product, which capture differences in achieved outcomes across countries. This article studies a complementary approach that also takes into account differences in countries’ fundamental economic structures associated with different capacities to raise revenue, which are not captured by simple ratios of revenue to gross domestic product. Non-parametric data envelopment analysis is applied to estimate domestic revenue potential in a panel of 118 low- and middle-income countries from 2008 to 2019. This approach provides a data-driven measure of how efficient each country is in raising domestic revenue given its national economic conditions. The results indicate that countries’ relative efficiencies do not exhibit the same strongly positive correlation with income levels as typically observed for ratios of revenue to gross domestic product. Instead, countries with low efficiency are spread across all income groups and geographical regions. This suggests that looking solely at ratios of revenue to gross domestic product might be misleading for drawing policy and normative conclusions about how much more revenue a country should aim to raise. Finally, panel regression analysis is used to investigate the extent to which international support is targeted at countries with larger untapped revenue potential.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135945655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16571976613141
Barry R. Weingast
Does liberty matter for economics? To address this question, I distinguish among three different types of liberty: Adam Smith’s, the neoclassical, and the so-called “classical liberal.” They differ in that the neoclassical and the classical liberal perspectives presume the existence, typically without noting it, of the four conditions that comprise the foundation of liberty, namely, secure property rights, enforcement of contracts, absence of government predation, and security. In contrast, Adam Smith sought to explain these foundations. In this article—an extraliterary review of one of the central themes of Acemoglu and Robinson (2019)—I draw the implications of Smith’s approach, and I explain why neoclassical economics—which takes the foundations of liberty as given—is unable to understand the work of Smith on this topic and, hence, on economic development. I also show that the neoclassical and the classical liberal approaches rest on a foundation of magic: they both presume the foundational conditions just noted but fail to explain how they arise. Put simply, the neoclassical approach has no explanation for the origin of liberty or of the mechanisms that sustain it. If markets require the four conditions of the foundation of liberty, then a complete explanation of the origin and development of markets must include an explanation of how these conditions come to hold. The Smithian economic perspective is especially important for today’s developing countries, most of which, at best, struggle to create the four foundational assumptions of liberty.
{"title":"Liberty and the neoclassical fallacy","authors":"Barry R. Weingast","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16571976613141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16571976613141","url":null,"abstract":"Does liberty matter for economics? To address this question, I distinguish among three different types of liberty: Adam Smith’s, the neoclassical, and the so-called “classical liberal.” They differ in that the neoclassical and the classical liberal perspectives presume the existence, typically without noting it, of the four conditions that comprise the foundation of liberty, namely, secure property rights, enforcement of contracts, absence of government predation, and security. In contrast, Adam Smith sought to explain these foundations. In this article—an extraliterary review of one of the central themes of Acemoglu and Robinson (2019)—I draw the implications of Smith’s approach, and I explain why neoclassical economics—which takes the foundations of liberty as given—is unable to understand the work of Smith on this topic and, hence, on economic development. I also show that the neoclassical and the classical liberal approaches rest on a foundation of magic: they both presume the foundational conditions just noted but fail to explain how they arise. Put simply, the neoclassical approach has no explanation for the origin of liberty or of the mechanisms that sustain it. If markets require the four conditions of the foundation of liberty, then a complete explanation of the origin and development of markets must include an explanation of how these conditions come to hold. The Smithian economic perspective is especially important for today’s developing countries, most of which, at best, struggle to create the four foundational assumptions of liberty.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45578774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-24DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16740293882620
John A. Dove, Laura Dove
This study assesses how perceptions about the quality of legal institutions affect entrepreneurial activity across US states. We employ survey data from the US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform regarding both the overall perceived institutional quality within a state and a multitude of subcategories. With a panel data set covering 2002–08, we find that along with overall legal quality, entrepreneurial activity across states is positively correlated with better perceptions about punitive damages, summary judgment, rules of discovery and admission of scientific and technical evidence at trial. Interestingly, interacting these variables with economic freedom typically generates non-results, though this is not the case when considering only opportunity entrepreneurship. Implications are discussed.
{"title":"Legal institutions, perceptions and entrepreneurship: an empirical investigation","authors":"John A. Dove, Laura Dove","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16740293882620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16740293882620","url":null,"abstract":"This study assesses how perceptions about the quality of legal institutions affect entrepreneurial activity across US states. We employ survey data from the US Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform regarding both the overall perceived institutional quality within a state and a multitude of subcategories. With a panel data set covering 2002–08, we find that along with overall legal quality, entrepreneurial activity across states is positively correlated with better perceptions about punitive damages, summary judgment, rules of discovery and admission of scientific and technical evidence at trial. Interestingly, interacting these variables with economic freedom typically generates non-results, though this is not the case when considering only opportunity entrepreneurship. Implications are discussed.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46395196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-03DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16730414164047
Christopher Mann, Paul Pecorino
This article investigates the implications of Baumol’s cost disease for a publicly provided good in the presence of distortionary taxation. A model is presented in which the publicly provided good experiences low labour productivity growth relative to the private good. The public sector will grow monotonically with the productivity differential between sectors and the tax rate will be pushed to the top of the Laffer curve over time. This article also finds that the desire for redistribution will be crowded out by the impact of unbalanced growth and Baumol’s cost disease.
{"title":"The impact of Baumol’s disease on government size, taxation and redistribution","authors":"Christopher Mann, Paul Pecorino","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16730414164047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16730414164047","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the implications of Baumol’s cost disease for a publicly provided good in the presence of distortionary taxation. A model is presented in which the publicly provided good experiences low labour productivity growth relative to the private good. The public sector will grow monotonically with the productivity differential between sectors and the tax rate will be pushed to the top of the Laffer curve over time. This article also finds that the desire for redistribution will be crowded out by the impact of unbalanced growth and Baumol’s cost disease.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44389473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16730281636465
Marianne Johnson
We recently marked the 60th anniversary of the book that established the field of public choice – The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. It was also the 30th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom et al’s ‘Covenants with and without a sword’, in which she demonstrated the capacity of individuals for self-governance without submission to an external authority. This article considers these two foundational works as a starting point from which to explore the intellectual tradition of ‘democratic optimism’ in public choice. The Buchanan/Ostrom legacy is an unshakable faith in the capacity of individuals for self-governance, a significant departure from more orthodox thinking that presumed the necessity of a social planner to oversee, coordinate and enforce collective actions. Their work also illustrates the importance of questioning the assumptions of economic models and modes of thought. Examination of antecedent assumptions is useful not only for understanding the depth and complexity of economic and political choices, but also for thinking about the history of the economics discipline, the viability of research programmes and the ‘danger of self-evident truths’.
{"title":"On classical liberalism and democratic optimism: James M. Buchanan and Elinor Ostrom","authors":"Marianne Johnson","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16730281636465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16730281636465","url":null,"abstract":"We recently marked the 60th anniversary of the book that established the field of public choice – The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. It was also the 30th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom et al’s ‘Covenants with and without a sword’, in which she demonstrated the capacity of individuals for self-governance without submission to an external authority. This article considers these two foundational works as a starting point from which to explore the intellectual tradition of ‘democratic optimism’ in public choice. The Buchanan/Ostrom legacy is an unshakable faith in the capacity of individuals for self-governance, a significant departure from more orthodox thinking that presumed the necessity of a social planner to oversee, coordinate and enforce collective actions. Their work also illustrates the importance of questioning the assumptions of economic models and modes of thought. Examination of antecedent assumptions is useful not only for understanding the depth and complexity of economic and political choices, but also for thinking about the history of the economics discipline, the viability of research programmes and the ‘danger of self-evident truths’.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44276774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-06DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16690538730983
Paola Brens, Theresa Fenech, Domenica Romeo
Ageing demographics have prompted widespread pension reforms across Latin America. This has left several countries with a significant financial burden related to the transition from one system to another. In this article, we evaluate two alternative methods of financing the recent pension reform in the Dominican Republic. We build on a simple real business cycle model with perfect competition and add a fiscal block that allows us to simulate shocks to the tax rates on capital and labour, based on the present value of the pension reform cost. We find that increasing the tax rate on returns to capital would not only fill the pension deficit, but also have a significantly smaller adverse effect on the macroeconomy, when compared with an increase to the tax on labour.
{"title":"Confronting increases to labour and capital taxes to finance the pension deficit in the Dominican Republic: a real business cycle approach","authors":"Paola Brens, Theresa Fenech, Domenica Romeo","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16690538730983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16690538730983","url":null,"abstract":"Ageing demographics have prompted widespread pension reforms across Latin America. This has left several countries with a significant financial burden related to the transition from one system to another. In this article, we evaluate two alternative methods of financing the recent pension reform in the Dominican Republic. We build on a simple real business cycle model with perfect competition and add a fiscal block that allows us to simulate shocks to the tax rates on capital and labour, based on the present value of the pension reform cost. We find that increasing the tax rate on returns to capital would not only fill the pension deficit, but also have a significantly smaller adverse effect on the macroeconomy, when compared with an increase to the tax on labour.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48578811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-25DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16592093941801
Aris Trantidis, Peter J. Boettke
Macroeconomic theories picture the economy as a phenomenon tractable by their analysis and thus manageable by macroeconomic policies guided by this analysis. This approach has withstood recurrent policy failures, competing theories and several changes of policy paradigms, from Keynesianism to monetarism, because the development of economics as a discipline has been entangled with the demand from policymakers to receive clear macroeconomic policy prescriptions from the expert community. The idea that policymakers can steer the economy in a desired direction relies upon the development of theories with prescriptive and predictive claims, which, in turn, rely on a great deal of analytic reductionism. As a result, reductionist theories continue to offer misrepresentations of the macro phenomenon, particularly by overlooking how policy interventions generate diverse and intractable micro-adaptations that develop into undesired, unforeseen and unintended system-level consequences. This trend continues to cause trouble: reductionist macroeconomic theories foster overconfident interventionist policies that contribute to macroeconomic instability.
{"title":"Macroeconomic policy as an epistemic problem","authors":"Aris Trantidis, Peter J. Boettke","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16592093941801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16592093941801","url":null,"abstract":"Macroeconomic theories picture the economy as a phenomenon tractable by their analysis and thus manageable by macroeconomic policies guided by this analysis. This approach has withstood recurrent policy failures, competing theories and several changes of policy paradigms, from Keynesianism to monetarism, because the development of economics as a discipline has been entangled with the demand from policymakers to receive clear macroeconomic policy prescriptions from the expert community. The idea that policymakers can steer the economy in a desired direction relies upon the development of theories with prescriptive and predictive claims, which, in turn, rely on a great deal of analytic reductionism. As a result, reductionist theories continue to offer misrepresentations of the macro phenomenon, particularly by overlooking how policy interventions generate diverse and intractable micro-adaptations that develop into undesired, unforeseen and unintended system-level consequences. This trend continues to cause trouble: reductionist macroeconomic theories foster overconfident interventionist policies that contribute to macroeconomic instability.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49508205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-02DOI: 10.1332/251569121x16571984676251
M. Antonelli, A. Castaldo, Valeria De Bonis, A. Gandolfo
We present an analytical literature review on optimal sin taxes. After identifying the distinctive features of sin goods, we develop a simple, encompassing model of the taxation of sin goods that allows for treating the main models found in the literature as subcases. We derive the optimal sin tax rates, while also considering the subsidisation of healthy goods. We then discuss the Pareto-improvement result obtained in the theoretical literature, confronting it with the debate on the regressivity of this kind of taxation. We highlight the crucial role of the interaction of tastes, self-control problems and poverty when deriving policy conclusions from theoretical models.
{"title":"Optimal taxation of sin goods: an analytical review","authors":"M. Antonelli, A. Castaldo, Valeria De Bonis, A. Gandolfo","doi":"10.1332/251569121x16571984676251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/251569121x16571984676251","url":null,"abstract":"We present an analytical literature review on optimal sin taxes. After identifying the distinctive features of sin goods, we develop a simple, encompassing model of the taxation of sin goods that allows for treating the main models found in the literature as subcases. We derive the optimal sin tax rates, while also considering the subsidisation of healthy goods. We then discuss the Pareto-improvement result obtained in the theoretical literature, confronting it with the debate on the regressivity of this kind of taxation. We highlight the crucial role of the interaction of tastes, self-control problems and poverty when deriving policy conclusions from theoretical models.","PeriodicalId":53126,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44290892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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