The importance of labour market responses, competitiveness impacts, and revenue recycling in determining the political economy costs of broad carbon taxation in the UK
研究了英国引入广泛碳税对宏观经济指标的影响,发现无干预时碳税会抑制GDP和就业,而部分收入循环利用可减少损失但加剧不平等。
Despite broad acceptance of the need to drastically reduce carbon emissions and limit global warming, political debates persist regarding the acceptability of actions to internalise carbon costs given potential impacts on the cost-of-living and income generation. We present fundamental macroeconomic and more complex computable general equilibrium analyses to consider how introducing broad carbon taxation might impact key macroeconomic indicators, taking the UK as an applied example. One key insight is that, with no other policy intervention, such a move introduces contractionary pressure through increases in consumer prices that reduces GDP, employment, and household spending, and erodes government revenue gains. The extent of contraction depends on the degree of resistance in labour markets to real wage rate reductions alongside substitutability away from taxed energy in determining prices, and on consequent export demand responses. A second is that where government prioritises balancing its budget, partial recycling of carbon tax revenues aimed at moderating negative impacts on firm costs and household real spending power can reduce wider economy losses. However, this is limited by wage bargaining and domestic consumption responses in a labour supply constrained and very open economy, with income tax recycling minimising macroeconomic losses at the cost of increasingly regressive outcomes.