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13.3 Pushing the Limits: Eco-Efficiency 241 13.3.2.3 Market Creation vs. Public Goods Management Establishing property rights for public environmental goods is the prerequisite for creating a market for these goods (see Annex I, Section I.2). The purpose is to generate better maintenance of nature’s assets, as well as more efficient supply and use of their services through market negotiation and pricing. However, as also indicated in the Annex, Coase-type negotiations rarely work in practice. The typical features of non-exclusion and non-rivalry of an environmental public good, together with short-sighted overexploitation by economic agents (the tragedy of the commons: Section 2.3.2), would make it necessary to maintain governmental ownership. In this case, cost-benefit analysis is the only tool to introduce some rationality in determining the social value and cost of providing the public good. However, controversial valuation techniques and limited validity from an overall Pareto optimality point of view impair the efficient governmental supply of public goods and services (Section 2.3.2 and Annex I). An effective way of managing environmental assets is maintaining public ownership, but leasing out the use of the assets to private corporations. In this case, the capture of resource rent through royalty payments (basically a taxation of profit from resource extraction and sale) can be justified from a long-term capital maintenance point of view. The absence of individual property rights indicates governmental responsibility for reinvesting the royalties for the mainte-nance of the ‘common wealth’. Of course, reinvestment into any type of capital caters to the weak sustainability concept only (Section 2.3.1). While applying prima facie to scarce natural resource stocks, the case can also be made for the use of absorptive capacities of the environment as argued in the greened national accounts (Section 8.1.2). The inability of many natural-resource-rich developing countries to transform their natural wealth into economic growth has become known as the ‘resource curse’ (Auty & Mikesell, 1998). The symptoms include Increase in currency value because of resource exports and corresponding slow-down of export-led development (Dutch disease7). Use of natural resource revenues in public and private consumption rather than for reinvestment. Social problems of conflict and corruption dogging the use of resource revenues. Figure 13.1 contrasts two countries’ differing success in turning natural wealth into economic growth. Botswana’s government managed to recover a much higher percentage of natural resource rent; it also reinvested these rents follow-ing a formal investment rule based on a Sustainable Budget Index. The result 7 The name stems from oil discovery in the North Sea, which created an increase in the Dutch cur-rency value, reducing the competitiveness of the Netherlands in international markets. 242 13 Tackling the Limits to Growth Fig. 13.1 Natural wealth and economic growth in Botswana and Namibia Source: Lange (2004), fig. 3; with permission by the copyright holder, Springer. Box 13.1 Averting the resource curse: The Chad-Cameroon pipeline project In 1999 the World Bank financed a pipeline from landlocked Chad through Cameroon to deliver its oil to an export terminal on the Atlantic Ocean. The deal was to invest most of the country’s oil revenues in a development fund under the control of the World Bank. In January 2006 the Bank froze the oil revenue accounts because of a new national law, giving the government unen-cumbered access to the oil revenues. In response, the government ordered two oil companies out of the country, dismissing at the same time several ministers. In July 2006, the compromise found was a memorandum of understanding, committing the government to spend 70% of its budget on ‘poverty reduction programs’. Sources: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/ AFRICAEXT/EXTREGINI/EXTCHADCAMPIPELINE/ 0,,contentMDK:20531903~menuPK:1104029~pagePK:64168445~piPK:64 168309~theSitePK:843238,00.html; public news. was a build-up of productive and financial wealth, and average annual eco-nomic growth (GDP p.c.) of 5%. Namibia, which does not have an explicit reinvestment policy, showed stagnant wealth and no discernible economic growth. The comparison is based on case studies of green accounting in the two countries (Lange et al., 2003). The authors conclude that such accounts ‘pro-vide a framework for a new way of thinking about environmental and natural resource management’. Such thinking may not come easy as illustrated by a World Bank project attempting to avert the resource curse in a newly oil-rich country (Box 13.1). 13.3 Pushing the Limits: Eco-Efficiency 243 13.3.3 From Theory to Practice: Ecological Tax Reform in Germany Germany’s ecological tax reform illustrates how governmental policy may water down an ambitious programme of cost internalization and a much-touted ‘win-win’ or ‘double-dividend’ strategy for sustainable development (Box 13.2). The idea of the tax reform is to use the revenue from a Pigovian eco-tax to reduce the labour tax burden (social security contributions) of both employers and employees. In other words, the purpose is a tax shift off the ‘goods’ of labour (in a situation of unemployment) and onto the ‘bads’ of environmental impacts. Table 13.3 sketches the transition from a theoretically desirable tax base of environmental damage to more practical emission and energy-use bases. The table also indicates the increasing de-ecologization of an eco-tax down to its current exemption-riddled implementation. In the end, the ecological tax reform looks more like a revenue-spinning tax increase for vague social and economic objectives than an effective instrument of environmental policy. Reading the table bottom-up points to possibilities of re-ecologizing the tax by relating its base to emission or preferably emission cost, instead of energy use. Tax rate differentiation and exemptions, notably for lignite and high-energy consumers, serve social and economic objectives rather than environmental ones. Box 13.2 Ecological tax reform in Germany Discussion of the double-dividend of an environmental tax dates back to the late 1970s in Germany. It was up to a red-green coalition of the social(ist) and green parties to implement the first stage of the ecological tax reform (ETR) in 1999. As of now, it is not clear whether the new government will continue implementing the further stages of the ETR [FR 13.2]. The ETR introduced a new electricity tax and increased the tax rates for gas, heating oil and gasoline (the latter by 3.07 euro-cent per litre). Most of the tax rates were intended to increase even beyond the legislative period of the (now defunct) coalition. Electricity from renewable resources and other environmentally friendly energy production is exempted as are coal and nuclear energy. A reduced tax rate applies to industrial and agricultural energy use beyond 50 megawatt/hr. Tax revenues are used to lower equally social security payments of employ-ers and employees, in order to realize the double dividend of the tax reform. High-eco-tax payers and generally all households receive further tax relief. The government claims that lower fuel consumption and corresponding CO emissions, and greater use of public transport (during 2000–2003) are the result of the eco-tax reform. Rising oil price in world markets might have played a more important role. 244 13 Tackling the Limits to Growth Table 13.3 Eco-tax in theory and practice Tax base 1. Marginal damage values ß 2. Average avoidance and mitigation cost ß 3. Physical impact indicators ß 4. Energy consumption (basic rationale of eco-tax reform in Germany) ß 5. Energy consumption of selected sectors (imple-mentation of eco-tax reform) Rationale Pareto optimality, allocation of externalities according to the polluter-pays prin-ciple (PPP) - Practical (standard) costing of externalities - Iterative cost adaptation for compliance with standards Assumed correlation of physical indicators with damage and/or avoidance cost Assumed correlation of energy consumption with emission potential of pri-mary energy carriers Exemptions for maintenance of competitiveness and regional employment Information requirement and critique - Measurement of (optimal) environmental damage - Allocation of damage cost to causing agents - Inconsistency with the cost concept of the national accounts - SEEA application of environ-mental maintenance costing - Sectoral rather than indi-vidual cost allocation - Normative standards for environmental cost calculation - Physical input-output table (PIOT) - Uncertain emission-damage correlation due to politically set tax rates - Assessment of emission potentials of different energy carriers - Energy consumption and its emission potential as place-holder for environmental impacts Loss of eco-efficiency: domi-nance of economic and social objectives Source: Bartelmus et al. (2003), table 4. Projected annual tax revenues of about 30 billion DM for 2002 and 20038 amount to about half the environmental cost estimates, assuming a continuing downward trend of environmental costs (see Section 8.3 and Annex II). Even this cautious estimate of environmental cost development indicates a significant under-coverage of environmental costs by a loopholed and narrowly defined (energy-consumption-based) eco-tax. The ecological tax reform seems to have missed by and large the target of hitting the environmental bad. But what about improving the good of employment? Market instruments should bring about Pareto-efficient, welfare maximizing resource allocation through environmental cost internalization. Market forces then 8 The Euro ( ) replaced the Deutsche mark (DM) in 1999 at a rate of 1 = 1.95 DM. 13.4 Sufficiency, Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Ethics 245 determine any cost-incidence and price formation. There is thus a priori no compelling argument for a particular use of the tax revenues, such as reduction of labour cost, compensation for environmental damage, investment in natural capital (environ-mental protection) or reducing governmental debt – to name the typically advanced suggestions for realizing double or triple dividends. One could however reason that high-risk delays in implementing the eco-tax require the fast use of revenues for environmental protection. Economic efficiency would have to be sacrificed in this case for ecological efficiency by speedy environmental action. The two case studies of resource rent absorption and ecological tax reform suggest alternative uses of the revenues from environmental fiscal instruments. Governmental owners of environmental assets should take the long-term view of sustaining economic activity by means of capital maintenance. Their objective should be to reinvest the natural capital rent in productive capital in order to maintain – as a minimum – the total capital value (in constant prices) for achieving weak sustainability of economic performance. Any excess revenue could then be used to increase capital for future economic growth and development or be spent for other purposes such as (public) consumption or social transfers. Private owners, on the other hand, should be either compensated for ecological services made available to others, i.e. for positive externalities, or penalized for the destruction or degradation of natural assets and corresponding negative externalities. This policy of internalizing positive and negative externalities takes the short-term view of changing the behaviour of economic agents towards greater economic and ecological efficiency in handling environmental assets. Revenues from eco-taxes might in this case be used for any governmental purpose (‘for the public good’). There is no reason (except offsetting the delayed efficacy of fiscal disincentives) why these revenues would have to reduce labour cost and income taxes rather than ending up in the general tax-pot. The main purpose of the widely publicized win-win strategy looks indeed more like selling the eco-tax to a tax-averse general public. 13.4 Adopting Limits: Sufficiency, Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Ethics 13.4.1 Voluntary Action: Sufficiency and Corporate Social Responsibility Section 3.2.1 addressed the concept of sufficiency as a necessary contribution of consumers to sustainability. Environmentalists consider sufficiency as a means of counteracting the greed of corporations through restraint from the demand side of markets [FR 13.1]. In their opinion, eco-efficiency in production is necessary to tackle environmental problems but cannot bring about, on its own, lasting environ-mental improvement. The reasons are ... - tailieumienphi.vn
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