Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline

Environmental Tax and the Distribution of Income among Heterogeneous Workers

This paper analyzes the environmental tax policy issues when labor is heterogeneous. The objective is to assess whether an environmental tax policy could be Pareto improving, when the revenue of the pollution tax is recycled by a change in the labor tax properties. We show that, depending on the heterogeneity characteristics of labor and on the initial structure of the tax system, a policy mix could be designed in order to leave each class of workers unharmed. It consists of an increase in progressivity together with a decrease in the flat rate component of the wage tax.

North/South Contractual Design Through the REDD+ Scheme

Climate change is a worldwide issue that needs to be tackled. One of the primary source of carbon emissions is deforestation and forest degradation responsible of anthropogenic GHG emissions in a range of 12% (Van der Werf et al. (2009)) to 15-20% (IPCC (2007a, 2007b)). To deal with the deforestation and forest degradation issue, the international community has been promoting the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation + (REDD+) scheme to design the post-Kyoto architecture. There is currently an ongoing debate with regards to the REDD+ scheme ∗This paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. Please do not circulate or cite without the author’s permission. †Paris School of Economics (PSE) Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, 106-112 Bd de l’Hopital, 75647 Paris Cedex 13, France, Tel: +33 1 44 07 82 24, E-mail: Mireille.Chiroleu-Assouline@univ-paris1.fr ‡Universite Montpellier 1, UMR5474 LAMETA, F-34000 Montpellier, France. Tel: +33 4 34 43 25 06. E-mail: jean-christophe.poudou@univ-montp1.fr §Universite Montpellier 3 Paul Valery & Universite Montpellier 1, UMR5474 LAMETA, F-34000 Montpellier, France. Tel: +33 4 34 43 25 49. E-mail: roussel@lameta.univ-montp1.fr

CSR Needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics:

Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments of corporate environmental responsibility.