Center for Business & Public Policy
Collaborative blog exploring the relationship between market forces and public policy.

What is that, a gastrointestinal disorder?   No, it’s the title of one of my recent research papers  (joint with Dan Karney and Kathy Baylis) about unilateral efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG).   When worldwide agreement is not possible, then the question is whether GHG abatement policy might be implemented by only one country, or bloc of countries (or region or sector).   The fear of any one country or bloc is that they would only raise their own cost of production, make themselves less competitive, and lose business to firms in other countries that may increase production and emissions.  When only one country limits their emissions, any positive effect on emissions elsewhere is called “leakage”.

Yes, that’s a word in economics, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leakage .

In efforts to “abate” or to reduce GHG emissions, the fear of lost business has pretty much deterred any attempt at unilateral climate policy.  That positive leakage might be called a “terms of trade effect” (TTE), because unilateral policy raises the price of exports and reduces the price of imports.   But our recent research paper points out a major effect that could offset part of that positive leakage.  The “negative leakage” term in the equation might be called an “abatement resource effect” (ARE).   That is, one additional thing happening is that the domestic firms face higher costs of their emissions, and so they want to substitute away from GHG emissions and instead use other resources for abatement – such as windmills, solar cells, energy efficient machinery, hybrids, electric cars, and even “carbon capture and sequestration” (CCS).  Thus they have at least SOME incentive to draw resources AWAY from other sectors or other countries.  If that effect is large, the result might shrink those other sectors’ operations overall, and thus possibly SHRINK emissions elsewhere.

I don’t mean to oversell this idea, because it probably does not completely offset the usual  positive “terms of trade effect”.  But in some circumstances it COULD be large, and it COULD result in net negative leakage.  The best example is probably to think about a tax or permit price for carbon emissions only in the electricity generating sector, within one country.  For simplicity, suppose there’s no trade with any other countries, so the only choice for consumers in this country is how much to spend on “electricity” and how much to spend on “all other goods”.   Demand for electricity is usually thought to be inelastic, which means consumers buy almost the same amount even as the price rises.  If firms need to produce almost as much electricity, while substantially reducing their GHG emissions, they must invest a lot of labor AND capital into windmills, solar panels, and CCS.  With any given total number of workers and investment dollars in the economy, then fewer resources are used to produce “all other goods”.

The ability of consumers to substitute between the two goods (electricity vs “all other”) is called the “elasticity of substitution in utility.”  The ability of firms to substitute between GHG emissions and those OTHER inputs is called the “elasticity of substitution in production”.  If the former is bigger than the latter, then net leakage is positive.  If the latter is bigger than the former, then net leakage can be negative.

Okay, too technical.  But the point is that other researchers have missed this “abatement resource effect” and overstated the likely positive effect on leakage.  And that omission has led to overstated fears about the bad effects of unilateral carbon policy.  What we show is that those fears are overstated, in some cases, where leakage may not be that bad.  With some concentration on those favorable cases, one country might be able to undertake some good for the world without fear that they just lose business to other sectors.

A recent NY Times has an article about SOL Austin, an acronym for Solutions Oriented Living.  This housing development is interesting for at least two reasons.  First, the designs and materials are intended to be “sustainable” (whatever that means), but also “net zero” (which I gather means that it will produce all the energy consumed).  The houses have solar panels and geothermal wells.

Second, however, it is interesting because it is in east Austin, the low-income part of town.  In fact, a 1928 “city plan” decided that east Austin would be “designated African-American”.  The 1962 construction of Interstate I-35 further divided east from west.  The relatively flat east side of Austin had all the industrial blight, pollution, and low-income housing.  In fact, it was quite cheap!  The hilly west side of Austin had the fancy new upscale houses with views of the Hill Country.

One would think that the intellectual-academic, left-leaning, high-income households of west Austin might be more interested in sustainable housing that could go “off the grid.”  Why then are these developers building super-energy-efficient houses in east Austin?

Well, for one thing, the 2010 census showed a 40% increase in east Austin’s white population and a drop in minority population.  In correlated fashion, land prices in east Austin have risen considerably.  In fact, a different article in the NY Times tells about a study based on the 2010 census finding that all residential segregation in U.S. cities has fallen significantly.  Cities are more racially integrated than at any time since 1910.  It finds that all-white enclaves “are effectively extinct”.  Black urban ghettos are shrinking. “An influx of immigrants and the gentrification of black neighborhoods contributed to the change, the study said, but suburbanization by blacks was even more instrumental.”

Since I’m visiting here in Austin, Texas, it is easy enough to go see the new development.  As you can see in the snapshot below, the houses have a modern box-like style.  They range from 1,000 to 1,800 square feet.  That explains the article’s reference to “matchbox” houses.    But the roofs are sloped enough to hold photovoltaic arrays and to channel rainwater into barrels.  

The developers said they wanted to “examine sustainability on a more holistic level, that would not just look at green buildings, but in our interest in affordability, in the economic and social components of sustainability as well.”  As stated in the NY Times article, the developers “hammered out a plan with … the nonprofit Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation, to sell 16 of the 40 homes to the organization.  The group, in turn, sold eight of the houses at a subsidized rate to low-income buyers (who typically were able to buy a house valued at more than $200,000 for half price).”  Each of those 16 subsidized homes has a photovoltaic array on the roof, though not necessarily large enough to produce all of the needed power for the house.

Of the “market-rate” houses, all sold at prices in the low $200,000’s.  Eleven have been sold, and thirteen have yet to be built.  Because of the financial and housing crisis, however, the “holistic” development ideas have not worked perfectly.  Homeowners got rebates from Austin Energy and tax credits from the federal government. So far, however, only four market-rate house owners paid the extra $24,000 for photovoltaic arrays substantial enough to fully power a house.  Only one is also heated and cooled by a geothermal well.  But they all have thermally efficient windows, foam insulation, and Energy Star appliances.

So far, only one couple paid to install the geothermal well and the extra energy monitoring system:  a systems engineer and a microbiologist.  So, “sustainability” in low-income neighborhoods might still require some gentrification.

With all the argument in Washington about how to balance the budget, a reminder is worthwhile that none of these numbers make any sense at all!  What “should” be the meaning of the government budget?  And, does any number provided by anybody actually have that meaning?

In general, a budget deficit is supposed to mean that one’s current consumption exceeds income, which would indicate a decrease in wealth.  Indeed, that’s the problem with a deficit – drawing down our wealth (which could even turn from positive to negative!).  The U.S. Federal budget numbers fail to provide such a meaning, for several reasons.

First, the Federal budget includes ALL spending, not just consumption.  Some of that spending is actually investment, such as new spending on buildings, bridges, roads, airplanes, and any long-lived military equipment.  The budget does not show the breakdown between what we really use up this year, and what spending is really investing in the future.

Second, Social Security is “off-budget”, unless you are looking at a unified budget.  Okay, I said that in a way that is intentionally confusing!  The basic problem here is that social security is SUPPOSED to run a surplus, so that we can set aside some funds from those now working to pay them when they are retired.  If it does not run a surplus to save for the retirement of the baby boom generation, then we’ll be in big trouble when the baby boom generation retires!  The current social security surplus is too small for that.  Then, however, the big problem is that the unified budget mixes the social security budget with the rest of federal spending.  So when you see a deficit in that account, it’s really worse than it looks, because it includes the small social security SURPLUS that’s already not a big enough surplus for social security to break even!

Third, the U.S. Federal Budget is confusing about what is a “Tax Expenditure” and what is government “Spending”.  A tax expenditure is really ‘spending via tax break’, as when a taxpayer gets a special credit or deduction for doing some particular activity.  The Congress could instead have accomplished the exact same thing by an ACTUAL spending program, providing subsidy to the same set of eligible individuals for doing the exact same activity.  So it really does not make much sense to say you want to cut spending and not raise taxes, because eliminating one of those tax breaks is really the same as eliminating an equivalent spending program.

Fourth, a Federal “mandate” might require a certain kind of spending by a firm.  To take a simple example, suppose some safety regulation requires construction firms to provide a hard hat to all workers.  That’s really equivalent to a tax on that firm, equal to the amount they have to spend on hard hats, where the revenue of that “tax” is spend by government on the provision of hard hats.  But then the problem is that mandates are so pervasive.  Some ‘true’ measure of the size of government would be HUGE, if we counted the dollar cost of all mandates as a “tax”, as if it were in the government budget.

The last-minute deal between Congress and the President managed to save the day, just before the deadline, but it’s not a very specific plan.   Any coherent long term plan for serious deficit reduction will still have to include cuts to defense and cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.  But the Republicans did not want to cut defense, the Democrats did not want to cut Medicare, and they can’t cut the large portion of the Federal budget that goes to interest payments on existing debt.  So instead, in the short run, they load high percentage cuts onto the small percentage of the remaining Federal budget that could be called discretionary.  Thus it seems we will experience very large cuts to items like National Parks, environmental programs, highways, training, education, and social infrastructure.

If the American people really want a government that is extremely small, especially compared to other developed economies such as those in the OECD, then the deficit problem could conceivably be solved by spending cuts alone (as long as those cuts include defense and entitlements).  Certainly some Tea Party Republicans want a Federal budget that small.  But I suspect that some other Republicans only think they want a Federal budget that small and would change their minds once they see the decimation of so many Federal programs.

In 2009, before the current round of cuts, the United States ranked third-to-last among the 23 OECD countries for the percentage of GDP collected by government.  I’m sure we would not want to match the 48% collected by some Scandinavian countries, or even the 40% collected by other European countries.  Somewhere in the middle, Canada appears with 31% of GDP collected by government.  The United States stood at only 24%, which exceeds only Mexico and Chile.  With only spending cuts and no increase in taxes, the U.S. could soon have the smallest government among all 23 nations of the OECD.  The following graph is from the Toronto Globe and Mail.

What might this mean for our state? Illinois is quite unusual, having just raised the State income tax to cover some of the growing annual deficit.  Other states with new Republican governors have drastically cut spending instead of raising taxes.  These actions might nudge Illinois upward, in the ranking of states by the ratio of tax collections to total state income, but it may allow Illinois to meet more of its obligations (including unfunded pension liabilities).  If Illinois did not raise any taxes, it may have had to renege on some such promises.

Republicans would tell you that smaller government and a smaller tax bite is always better for job growth.  But it’s a matter of degree, and a matter of balance.  A state with the smallest possible budget would have very little spending on infrastructure, road quality, sanitation, police protection, education, training, and other social services.  Yet many of those programs are important for businesses to be able to function properly.  The trick is to find the right balance, with spending on the minimal decent level of such programs, as necessary for businesses and employees alike.

With no increase in Federal taxes, the recent deal on cuts in spending is likely to mean cuts in all kinds of Federal discretionary spending, including grants to the states.  The U.S. Congress will then be likely to enact more unfunded state mandates, which means requiring the states to spend their own money to provide basic services that the Federal government used to provide.  State governors and legislators will be unhappy about these changes, with even more pressure on state governments.

In early January 2011, the State of Illinois enacted legislation to raise the personal income tax rate from 3% to 5% and to increase the corporate income rate from 4.8% to 7%.  Along with a cap on spending growth, these tax increases reduce the state’s projected budget deficit in 2011 by $3.8 billion (from $10.9 to $7.1 billion), according to the University of Illinois and their Institute of Government and Public Affairs (IGPA Fiscal Fallout #5).  The governor justified the tax increases on the grounds that the State’s “fiscal house was burning” (Chicago Tribune, January 12, 2011).  Dan Karney and I wrote a recent piece for the IGPA Forum, but we don’t debate the reasons for the underlying fiscal crisis in the State of Illinois, nor argue the merits of cutting spending versus raising revenue to balance the budget.  Instead, we just stipulate that politicians decided to raise revenue as part of the solution to the State’s deficit.  Then we analyze the use of “green taxes” as an alternate means of raising revenue that could mitigate or eliminate the need for increasing income taxes.

In general, green taxes are taxes either directly on pollution emissions or on goods whose use causes pollution.  In the revenue-raising context however, the basic argument for green taxes can be summarized by the adage: “tax waste, not work”.  That is, taxes on labor income discourages workers from engaging in productive activities and thus hurts society, while taxing waste discourages harmful pollution and thus benefits society.  In addition, the revenue raised from these green taxes can help the State’s fiscal crisis. 

While many green taxes could be implemented, we focus on four specific examples that have the potential to raise large amounts of revenue: carbon pricing, gasoline taxes, trucking tolls, and garbage fees.  Indeed, as we show, a reasonable set of tax rates on these four items can generate as much revenue as the income tax increase.  That is, imposing green taxes can completely fill the $3.8 billion difference between the projected baseline deficit ($10.9 billion) and the post-tax deficit ($7.1 billion). 

Yet we omit many other potentially high-revenue green taxes.  For example, the State could tax nitrogen-based fertilizers that contribute to nitrogen run-off pollution in streams, rivers, and lakes.  These omissions do not imply that other green taxes could not be implemented.  Also, the simple analysis does not include behavioral responses by consumers and businesses.  Rather, we apply hypothetical green taxes directly to historical quantities of emissions (or polluting products) in order to obtain an approximate level of potential revenue generation.  

In a short series of blogs, one per week, we now discuss each of the four green taxes and their potential for revenue generation.  This week: Carbon Pricing.

In 2008, electricity generators in the State of Illinois emitted almost 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency (EIA).  See the State Historical Tables of their Estimated Emissions by State (EIA-767 and EIA-906).  While the United States has no nationwide price on carbon – neither a tax nor a cap-and-trade (permit) policy – some jurisdictions within the United States have imposed their own carbon policies.  For instance, a coalition of Northeastern states implemented the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) to limit CO₂ emissions using a permit policy.  To date, RGGI’s modest effort has already generated close to $1 billion in revenue for the coalition states.

If Illinois were to adopt its own carbon pricing policy, then even a modest tax rate or permit price could raise significant revenue.  For instance, a $5 per metric ton CO₂ price on emissions from electricity producers generates about $500 million in revenue (or 14.4% of the $3.8 billion raised from the state’s income tax hike).  By way of comparison, if the extra $500 million in emission taxes were entirely passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity bills, then the average consumer’s bill would increase by 3.75%  (where $13.3 billion is spent annually on electricity in Illinois).

Table 1 reports the possible “revenue enhancement” from the $5 per metric ton tax, along with three other pricing scenarios.  Both the $5 and $10 rates are hypothetical prices created by the authors for expositional purposes.  In contrast, the $20 per metric ton price is approximately the carbon price faced by electricity producers in Europe’s Emission Trading System (ETS).  At the $20 rate, a carbon tax in Illinois generates almost $2 billion – over half of the tax revenue from the income tax increases.  Finally, the $40 tax rate (or carbon price) is from Richard S. J. Tol (2009), “The Economic Effects of Climate Change,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 23(2): 29-51.  It is an estimate of the optimal carbon price that accounts for all of the negative effects from carbon emissions.  At this “optimal” price, the revenue from pricing carbon in Illinois by itself could replace the needed tax revenue from the State’s income tax increase.

Gas prices are back in the news, simply because gas prices are rising.  Reporters like to discuss WHY gas prices are rising, but who knows?  The price of gasoline or crude oil can vary with any change, either in supply or demand.  We can always point to shifts in demand (like the growing economies of China and India), and we can always point to shifts in supply (like the shutdown of production due to unrest in countries of the Middle East and North Africa).  But it’s very difficult to sort out the net impact of each such factor, since the price is affected daily by so many different changes.

Instead of trying to answer that question here and now, let’s take a step back and look at whether any of the current changes are really that unusual.  Is the price of gas really high by historical standards?  And how much of that gas price is driven by energy policy, taxes, and factors under the control of policymakers?  In other words, let’s just look at the facts for now, and then try to analyze them later!

Here are the facts, for the fifty years since 1960.  The first figure below is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).  Look first at the BLUE line, where we see what you already know:  the nominal price of gasoline has risen from $0.31/gallon to what’s now $3.56/gallon.  It’s driving us broke, right?

Well, not so fast.  The RED line corrects for inflation, showing all years’ prices in 2011 dollars.  So both series stand at $3.56/gallon in 2011, but the red line shows that the “real” (inflation-corrected) price of gasoline back in 1960 was $2.33/gallon.  In fact, compare the red line from 1960 to 2009: over those fifty years, the real price of gasoline only changed from $2.33 to $2.42 per gallon – virtually no change in the real price at all! 

From 2009 to 2011 the real price increased beyond $2.42, rising to $3.56/gallon, but that may be temporary.  You can see that the red line bounces around for the whole fifty year period.   In 1980, the real price was $3.35/gallon, so the current price is not much different from previous upward blips in the real price of gas.

Now look at the U.S. Federal Gasoline Tax Rate, in the next figure.  The red line in the next figure shows that the nominal statutory tax rate was four cents per gallon for years, and then it was increased in various increments to 18 cents per gallon today.  But of course, inflation has changed the real value of that tax rate as well.  Using 2011 dollars again, both real and nominal tax rates are 18 cents per gallon today.  But in 2011 dollars, the 4 cents per gallon back in 1960 was really equivalent to 29 cents today.  In other words, the real gas tax in the green line has fallen from 29 cents per gallon fifty years ago to only 18 cents today.

The gas price may be rising, but not due to any increase in the Federal gas tax.  That Federal gas tax is falling in real terms.  In the next entry, we’ll take a look at the various State gas tax rates, and we’ll look at how many of those taxes are fixed per gallon – so that they fall in real terms as inflation reduces the real value of those State tax rates.

A lot of research in environmental economics is all about the choice of environmental policy: a pollution tax, an abatement subsidy, tradable permits, or some regulatory mandate.  Economists have made two primary distinctions.  One distinction is between a price instrument (like a tax or subsidy) and a quantity instrument (like a fixed number of permits, or nontradable quota).  It’s a bit esoteric, but the choice between those two categories depends on uncertainty about the cost of abatement, and the slope of the marginal abatement cost curve.

A different key distinction is between a market based instrument (like tax OR tradable permits), as opposed to command and control regulations (like quotas or technology requirements).   This distinction is not so esoteric: having a tax or permit price per unit of pollution provides incentives to abate pollution in all the cheapest ways, and therefore minimizes the cost of abatement.  In contrast, regulators may easily require forms of abatement that are much more expensive.  Estimates suggest that command and control regulation can be six times as expensive as using market based instruments.

The point of this blog, however, is that these choices are too simple.  They do not encompass actual policy choices that are not only more complicated, but that cannot even be so categorized.   The “tax” is usually not on pollution itself, but on gasoline or on a car.  Also, virtually every “reform” is a package, and should be considered as a package!  I’ve shown in earlier research that the combination of a subsidy to abatement plus a tax on output can be functionally equivalent to the ideal tax on pollution.

Another “combination” is in the European Union, where a cap-and-trade carbon permit system applies to about half the economy, including electricity generation and major industries, but which does not cover small industries, residences, and transportation.  So they are now considering a carbon tax for the “nontrading” sector.

And anything done in the United States is likely to be a hybrid.  The Congress seems to want a cap-and trade permit system, or at least to call it a cap-and-trade permit system.  But that variable price may have a ceiling, and it may have a floor.  At the extreme, in a hybrid system as the ceiling and floor get closer to each other, the system converges to the single price of a carbon tax.  In other words, it’s not really one or the other.

Despite the complications, it may be worth our while to think about the ideal combination of policies, not the choice among distinct alternatives.

In 2008, the federal government’s receipts were 17% of GNP, and its expenditures including transfer payments were 21.4% of GNP (implying the budget deficit was 4.4% of GNP).  If State and Local taxes and expenditures are added to those numbers, they become 30.5% and 35.2% of GNP, respectively.  For many reasons, however, government’s reach is wider than reflected in those numbers.  Government does not just spend its own tax revenue; it spends other people’s money as well.

For just one example, consider environmental regulations.  I have not seen a recent estimate of the total costs of environmental protection, so I will rely on some older numbers.  Note, however, than none of this discussion is meant to imply that the environment should not be protected!   Maybe protections should be more limited, or expanded.  The point is just that measured dollar expenditure by government does not accurately reflect its true size.

In “The Cost of Clean”, the U.S. EPA in 1990 estimated that the total private cost of required environmental protection was approximately $115 billion (in 1990 dollars) or 2.1% of GNP.  By the year 2000, they said the value could approach 2.8% of GNP.  If I assume the same rate of growth through 2008, then these private costs of environmental protection could be as high as 3.5% of GNP by 2008, a figure that would be $514.0 billion, or 21.6% of non-defense federal expenditures.

This cost of environmental protection comes mainly in the form of mandates imposed on firms.  Examples of mandates include the forced adoption of best practices pollution abatement technology or binding emission rates (e.g. limits on pollution per unit of output).  However, these mandates are just like taxes in two respects.  First, the government imposes these costs on private firms.  Second, the mandates provide “public goods” like clean air and water that we all can enjoy.

In other words, if these costs to private firms were converted into an equivalent tax program with direct government expenditures, then U.S. discretionary spending would appear to be 21.6% higher.  These expenditures do not appear explicitly in the federal budget, so they merit further study.  How do we divide our limited resources between private or public consumption, versus private or public investment?  How much of that environmental spending is in each category?  What are we getting for these outlays?  How can we measure the value of the improved environment?  Do these expenditures provide environmental benefits now, or are they investment in the future?

In order address these questions, a full “environmental budget” would need to show each cost, including the cost of complexity created by mandates.  In addition, some environmental protection programs are required by state and local governments (just like taxes).  Each of the programs has implicit transfers from one state to another, and from one income group to another (just like taxes).  Why are these programs not evaluated just like taxes?

A member of Congress who wants to spend additional money often has to say what tax will be raised to pay for it.  Somebody else who wants a particular tax cut for their favorite lobbyist may have to say what other tax will be raised.  As a general principle, this kind of “budget neutrality” is often a good idea.  In all likelihood, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 only succeeded because it was revenue neutral.  It broadened the tax base and lowered tax rates, to fix the tax system without changing the amount collected.

But how is revenue neutrality calculated?  Politicians on both sides of the aisle call upon the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as the arbiter of budget balance.  If important policy choices must pass the CBO’s litmus test, then we need to understand what test is being administered.  According to its website, the “CBO’s [cost estimate] statement must also include an assessment of what funding is authorized in the bill to cover the costs of the mandates and, for intergovernmental mandates, an estimate of the appropriations needed to fund such authorizations for up to 10 years after the mandate is effective” (http://www.cbo.gov/CEBackground.shtml).  This CBO test has a few major problems that could limit the benefits from a policy, or even prevent enactment of a good policy.

First of all, not every act of Congress must be revenue neutral.  But policymakers may want the restriction of revenue neutrality, in order to “prove” they are fiscally responsible.  Recently, President Obama in his health care policy speech to a joint session of Congress promised that he “will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.”  Thus, one general problem is: who decides which projects must be revenue neutral?

Second, of course, a project may generate revenue or cost savings after ten years.  President Obama’s health care reform has initial start up costs, but it may “bend” the long-run cost curve for federal expenditures on Medicare and Medicaid, so that cost savings accrue and accumulate over more than ten years.  In general, the CBO’s ten-year balance sheet could say that a policy adds to the debt over ten years, even though it may save taxpayer dollars in the long-run.  On Wednesday, September 16, 2009, the CBO released its official cost estimate for the Senate Finance Committee’s draft health care bill, stating that it would have a “net reduction in federal budget deficits of $49 billion over the 2010–2019 period” (http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=354).  However, an additional, unofficial estimate by the CBO concluded that the “the added revenues and cost savings are projected to grow more rapidly than the cost of the coverage expansion”, meaning that over a longer time horizon that the bill further reduces the deficits.

To be clear, the federal debt is a real concern.  Running massive deficits that pile up year after year is unsustainable and irresponsible.  But a strict CBO ten-year cost estimate test may not be the best way to evaluate a potential policy change.

A third problem is that any such test must be somewhat arbitrary, regarding what is counted as “revenue”.  Does it just count actual dollars flowing into government coffers?  What about features of a policy that reduce future outflows?  Some pieces of additional spending in proposed health care reforms are intended to improve future heath and thus to avoid the need for some future medical expenses.  The CBO would count current “preventive care” spending as a cost, but it may not count the fact that this current spending could reduce the need for Medicare and Medicaid to pay for some future medical procedures.

Fourth, and most importantly, even if NOT revenue-neutral, SOME policies are still valuable, important, and worthwhile.  A project may have generalized benefit to everybody in society that exceeds the actual social cost, meaning that it passes a benefit-cost test, even though it requires government spending and is not “revenue neutral”.

Any revenue-neutrality test is a way for policymakers to “tie themselves to the mast” and prevent them from pork spending of the most egregious sort.  Maybe that’s good and worthwhile.  But it may also mean we can’t have some other worthwhile policies either.

Economists have tools to analyze the distributional effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, and corporate income taxes.  Some existing research even looks at distributional effects of environmental or energy taxes used to help control pollution or energy consumption.  Yet most pollution policy does not involve taxation at all!  Instead, we use permits or command and control regulations such as technology standards, quotas, and quantity constraints.  Existing studies of energy policy are mostly about effects on economic efficiency, addressing questions such as: how to measure the costs of reducing pollution or energy use, how to measure benefits of that pollution abatement, what is the optimal amount of protection, and what is the most cost-effective way to achieve it.

Yet environmental mandates do impose costs, and an important question is who bears those costs.  Moreover, those restrictions provide benefits of environmental protection, so who gets those benefits?  Full analysis of environmental policy could address all the same questions as in tax analysis.  Perhaps it could use the same tools to address distributional effects – not of taxes, but of these other policies that are used to protect the environment.

Thinking about the distributional effects of environmental policy is interesting and difficult.  For example, a standard tax analysis would point out some complex implications of an excise tax: not only does it affect the relative price of the taxed commodity, and thus consumers according to how they use income, but it also impacts factors intensively used in the production of that commodity, and thus individuals according to the sources of their income.  Yet an environmental mandate can have those effects and more!  Consider a simple requirement that electric generating companies cut a particular pollutant to less than some maximum quota.  This type of mandate is a common policy choice, and it has at least the following six distributional effects.

First, it raises the cost of production like a tax, so it may raise the equilibrium price of output and affect consumers according to spending on electricity.

Second, it may reduce production like a tax, reduce returns in that industry, and place burdens on workers or investors.

Third, a quota is likely to generate scarcity rents.  For simplicity, suppose pollution has a fixed relation to output, so the only “abatement technology” is to reduce output.  Then a restriction on the quantity of pollution is essentially a restriction on output.  Normally firms want to restrict output but are thwarted by antitrust policy.  Yet in this case, environmental policy requires firms to restrict output.  It allows firms to raise price, and so they make profits, or rents, from the artificial scarcity of production.  Just as tradable permit systems hand out valuable permits, the non-tradable quota also provides scarcity rents – to those given the restricted “rights” to pollute.

Fourth, if it cleans up the air, this policy provides benefits that may accrue to some individuals more than others.  The “incidence” of these costs and benefits usually refers to their distribution across groups ranked from rich to poor, but analysts and policy-makers may also be interested in the distribution of costs or benefits across groups defined by age, ethnicity, region, or between urban, rural, and suburban households.

Fifth, regardless of a neighborhood’s air quality improvement, many individuals could be greatly affected through capitalization effects, especially through land and house prices.  Suppose this pollution restriction improves air quality everywhere, but in some locations more than others.  If the policy is permanent, then anybody who owns land in the most-improved locations experience capital gains that could equal the present value of all future willingness to pay for cleaner air in that neighborhood. Similar capitalization effects provide windfall gains and losses to those who own corporate stock: capital losses on stockholdings in the company that must pay more for environmental technology, and capital gains on stockholdings in companies that sell a substitute product.

Capitalization effects are pernicious.  A large capital gain may be experienced by absentee landlords, because they can charge higher rents in future years.  Certain renters with cleaner air might be worse off, if their rent increases by more than their willingness to pay for that improvement.  Moreover, the gains may not even accrue to those who breathe the cleaner air!  If households move into the cleaner area after the policy change, then they must pay more for the privilege.  The entire capital gain goes to those who happen to own property at the time of the change, even if they sell it at the higher price and move out before the air improves.  Similarly, new stockholders in the burdened company may be “paying” for abatement technology in name only, with the entire present value of the burden felt by those who did own the stock at the time of enactment, even if they sell that stock before the policy is implemented.

Sixth, strong distributional effects are felt during the transition.  If workers are laid off by the impacted firm, their burden is not just the lower wage they might have to accept at another firm.  It includes the very sharp pain of disruption, retraining, and months or years of unemployment between jobs.  These effects are analogous to capitalization effects, if the worker has large investment in particular skills – human capital that is specific to this industry.  If the industry shrinks, those workers suffer a significant loss in the value of that human capital.  They must also move their families, acquire new training, and start back at the bottom of the firm hierarchy, with significant psychological costs.

The challenge here is that many of these effects of environmental policy are likely to be regressive.  Consider the six categories just listed.  First, it likely raises the price of products that intensively use fossil fuels, such as electricity and transportation.  Expenditures on these products make up a high fraction of low income budgets.  Second, if abatement technologies are capital-intensive, then any mandate to abate pollution likely induces firms to use new capital as a substitute for polluting inputs.  If so, then capital is in more demand relative to labor, depressing the relative wage (which may also impact low-income households).  Third, pollution permits handed out to firms bestow scarcity rents on well-off individuals who own those firms.  Fourth, low-income individuals may place more value on food and shelter than on incremental improvements in environmental quality.  If high-income individuals get the most benefit of pollution abatement, then this effect is regressive as well.  Fifth, low-income renters miss out on house price capitalization of air quality benefits.  Well-off landlords may reap those gains.  Sixth, transition effects are hard to analyze, but could well impact the economy in ways that hurt the unemployed, those already at some disadvantage relative to the rest of us.

That is a potentially incredible list of effects that might all hurt the poor more than the rich.  The challenge for those of us who want to claim to do policy-relevant research, then, is to determine whether these fears are valid, and whether anything can be done about them – other than to forego environmental improvements!