Kenneth Backlund

Nuclear Power, Externalities and Non-Standard Pigouvian Taxes

The external effects arising from the use of nuclear power are, in a fundamental way, related to uncertainty. In this paper we locate these external effects and derive a dynamic Pigouvian tax in order to make the decentralized economy support the command optimum. Another interesting result is that a small constant energy tax (which we interpret as a second best policy) can take the decentralized economy reasonably close to the command optimum.

Welfare Measurement in Imperfect Markets

This book cleverly integrates the research on welfare measurement and social accounting in imperfect market economies. In their previously acclaimed volume, Welfare Measurement, Sustainability and Green National Accounting, the authors focused on the external effects associated with environmental damage and analysed their role in the context of social accounting. This book adopts a much broader perspective by analysing a wide spectrum of resource allocation problems of real-world market economies.

On the Role of Green Taxes in Social Accounting

This paper addresses social accounting numerically in a dynamic generalequilibrium model. The main purposes are to study: (i) whether emissiontaxes based on static willingness to pay information can be used to improvethe welfare level, and; (ii) whether these taxes provide close enoughapproximations of the correct Pigouvian emission tax to be useful in thecontext of social accounting. The results indicate that, if environmentalquality is relatively linear with respect to pollution, the approximation ofthe Pigouvian emission tax will bring the economy close to the sociallyoptimal solution and, at the same time, provide a close approximation of thevalue of net investments in environmental capital.

Optimal tax and expenditure policy in the presence of emigration: Are credit restrictions important?

This paper concerns optimal income taxation in the presence of emigration. The basic model is a two-period model where all agents are identical and live in the home country in the first period of life, but where some emigrate at the end of the first period. It is shown that with a binding credit restriction, the government will tax labor income in the first period at a higher rate than otherwise, whereas the labor income tax in the second period is unaffected by emigration. With heterogenous agents, the labor income tax in period two will be affected by emigration.