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Environmental Tax Competition and Welfare: The Good News about Lobbies

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  • Bontems, Philippe
  • Cheikbossian, Guillaume
  • Hafidi, Houda

Abstract

This paper focuses on the welfare effects of domestic and international lobbying in the context of two countries linked by both trade and pollution. We consider a reciprocal-markets model where, in each country, a domestic firm produces a polluting good, that can result in a cross-national environmental externality, and competes in quantities in each market with a foreign firm. Each government independently sets a pollution tax under political pressure from green and industrial lobbies `a la Grossman and Helpman (1994). Our results mainly show that political pressure from domestic and/or international lobbies can help mitigate tax competition between the two countries, resulting in an improvement in social welfare. In fact, lobbying acts much like a strategic delegation device by changing the social welfare weights in the objective function of each government. The (potential) welfare-improving effect of political pressure depends on the relative strengths of the lobbies and on the nature of the strategic interactions in taxes.

Suggested Citation

  • Bontems, Philippe & Cheikbossian, Guillaume & Hafidi, Houda, 2024. "Environmental Tax Competition and Welfare: The Good News about Lobbies," TSE Working Papers 24-1551, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).
    • Handle: RePEc:tse:wpaper:129516
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Lobbying; transboundary pollution; international trade; international politics; environmental tax;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
    • F18 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade and Environment
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy

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