IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/idb/brikps/6606.html

Does Firm Heterogeneity Impact the Effectiveness of Carbon Taxes? Experiments in Argentina and Mexico

Author

Listed:
  • Chisari, Omar O.
  • Miller, Sebastián J.

Abstract

This paper examines the effectiveness of carbon taxes on macroeconomic performance when manufacturing firms have the opportunity to change their scale of operation and degree of formality. The hypothesis is that when tax evasion or elusion is possible, it cannot be ruled out that emissions increase rather than decrease due to the reallocation of resources from the rest of manufacturing towards informal small-scale firms. When informality is high, industry could adapt to carbon taxes by reducing the scale of operation of big firms and increasing the number of small firms. However, when taxes are enforceable in all types of firms, there is a cost in terms of GDP and employment, since small-scale firms are more labor intensive. For numerical experiments, two CGE models calibrated for Argentina and Mexico are used. The 'domestic leakage' is found to be more relevant for Argentina than for Mexico.

Suggested Citation

  • Chisari, Omar O. & Miller, Sebastián J., 2014. "Does Firm Heterogeneity Impact the Effectiveness of Carbon Taxes? Experiments in Argentina and Mexico," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 6606, Inter-American Development Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:idb:brikps:6606
    DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18235/0011655
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/Does-Firm-Heterogeneity-Impact-the-Effectiveness-of-Carbon-Taxes-Experiments-in-Argentina-and-Mexico.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/http://dx.doi.org/10.18235/0011655?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James R. Tybout, 2000. "Manufacturing Firms in Developing Countries: How Well Do They Do, and Why?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 38(1), pages 11-44, March.
    2. Brock, William A. & Taylor, M. Scott, 2005. "Economic Growth and the Environment: A Review of Theory and Empirics," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 28, pages 1749-1821, Elsevier.
    3. Gene M. Grossman & Alan B. Krueger, 1991. "Environmental Impacts of a North American Free Trade Agreement," NBER Working Papers 3914, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Ayyagari, Meghana & Beck, Thorsten & Demirguc-Kunt, Asl, 2003. "Small and medium enterprises across the globe : a new database," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3127, The World Bank.
    5. Chang-Tai Hsieh & Peter J. Klenow, 2009. "Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 124(4), pages 1403-1448.
    6. Liu, Antung Anthony, 2012. "Tax Evasion and Optimal Environmental Taxes," RFF Working Paper Series dp-12-37, Resources for the Future.
    7. Auguste, Sebastián & Bebczuk, Ricardo N. & Sánchez, Gabriel, 2013. "Firm Size and Credit in Argentina," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 4498, Inter-American Development Bank.
    8. Maia David & Alain-Désiré Nimubona & Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné, 2007. "Environmental Taxation and the Structure of the Eco-industry," Working Papers 2007/02, INRA, Economie Publique.
    9. Erkki Koskela & Ronnie Schöb, 2002. "Optimal Factor Income Taxation in the Presence of Unemployment," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 4(3), pages 387-404, July.
    10. Omar Chisari & Gustavo Ferro & Mariano González & Sonia León & Javier Maquieryra & Leonardo Mastronardi & Mauricio Roitman & Carlos Romero & Ricardo Theller, 2010. "Modelo de Equilibrio General Computado para la Argentina 2006," UADE Textos de Discusión 63_2010, Instituto de Economía, Universidad Argentina de la Empresa.
    11. Sebastian Galiani & Federico Weinschelbaum, 2012. "Modeling Informality Formally: Households And Firms," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 50(3), pages 821-838, July.
    12. Balistreri, Edward J. & Rutherford, Thomas F., 2013. "Computing General Equilibrium Theories of Monopolistic Competition and Heterogeneous Firms," Handbook of Computable General Equilibrium Modeling, in: Peter B. Dixon & Dale Jorgenson (ed.), Handbook of Computable General Equilibrium Modeling, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 1513-1570, Elsevier.
    13. Peres, Wilson & Stumpo, Giovanni, 2000. "Small and Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprises in Latin America and the Caribbean Under the New Economic Model," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 28(9), pages 1643-1655, September.
    14. Rauch, James E., 1991. "Modelling the informal sector formally," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 33-47, January.
    15. repec:bla:scandj:v:91:y:1989:i:3:p:547-63 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Omar O. Chisari & Sebastián J. Miller, 2014. "Does Firm Heterogeneity Impact the Effectiveness of Carbon Taxes? Experiments in Argentina and Mexico," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 86256, Inter-American Development Bank.
    2. Becker, Dennis, 2014. "Heterogeneous Firms and Informality: The Effects of Trade Liberalization on Labor Markets," Working Papers 180124, Cornell University, Department of Applied Economics and Management.
    3. Markus Poschke, 2018. "The Firm Size Distribution across Countries and Skill-Biased Change in Entrepreneurial Technology," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 10(3), pages 1-41, July.
    4. Abreha,Kaleb Girma & Cirera,Xavier & Davies,Elwyn Adriaan Robin & Fattal Jaef,Roberto N. & Maemir,Hibret Belete, 2022. "Deconstructing the Missing Middle : Informality and Growth of Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10233, The World Bank.
    5. Rothenberg, Alexander D. & Gaduh, Arya & Burger, Nicholas E. & Chazali, Charina & Tjandraningsih, Indrasari & Radikun, Rini & Sutera, Cole & Weilant, Sarah, 2016. "Rethinking Indonesia’s Informal Sector," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 96-113.
    6. Julio Cesar Leal Ordonez, 2014. "Tax collection, the informal sector, and productivity," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 17(2), pages 262-286, April.
    7. Gabriel Ulyssea, 2018. "Firms, Informality, and Development: Theory and Evidence from Brazil," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(8), pages 2015-2047, August.
    8. D'Erasmo, Pablo N. & Moscoso Boedo, Hernan J., 2012. "Financial structure, informality and development," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 286-302.
    9. Pablo N. D’Erasmo, 2016. "Access to Credit and the Size of the Formal Sector," Economía Journal, The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association - LACEA, vol. 0(Spring 20), pages 143-199.
    10. Demirguc-Kunt, Asli & Klapper, Leora F. & Panos, Georgios A., 2009. "Entrepreneurship in post-conflict transition : the role of informality and access to finance," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4935, The World Bank.
    11. Lopez-Martin, Bernabe, 2019. "Informal Sector Misallocation," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(8), pages 3065-3098, December.
    12. Levon Barseghyan & Riccardo DiCecio, 2009. "Entry costs, misallocation, and cross-country income and TFP differences," Working Papers 2009-005, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    13. Jales, Hugo & Yu, Zhengfei, 2020. "Labor market policies in a Roy-Rosen bargaining economy," CLEF Working Paper Series 29, Canadian Labour Economics Forum (CLEF), University of Waterloo.
    14. Poschke, Markus, 2013. "The Decision to Become an Entrepreneur and the Firm Size Distribution: A Unifying Framework for Policy Analysis," IZA Discussion Papers 7757, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    15. Reyes Aterido & Mary Hallward-Driemeier & Carmen Pagés, 2011. "Big Constraints to Small Firms' Growth? Business Environment and Employment Growth across Firms," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 59(3), pages 609-647.
    16. Julia Passabom Araujo & Mauro Rodrigues, 2015. "Taxation, credit constraints and the informal economy," Working Papers, Department of Economics 2015_43, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP).
    17. Fabian Knorre & Martin Wagner & Maximilian Grupe, 2021. "Monitoring Cointegrating Polynomial Regressions: Theory and Application to the Environmental Kuznets Curves for Carbon and Sulfur Dioxide Emissions," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-35, March.
    18. Galiani, Sebastian & Meléndez, Marcela & Ahumada, Camila Navajas, 2017. "On the effect of the costs of operating formally: New experimental evidence," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 143-157.
    19. Bento, Pedro & Restuccia, Diego, 2021. "On average establishment size across sectors and countries," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 220-242.
    20. Todd Kumler & Eric Verhoogen & Judith Frías, 2020. "Enlisting Employees in Improving Payroll Tax Compliance: Evidence from Mexico," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(5), pages 881-896, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C68 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Computable General Equilibrium Models
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:idb:brikps:6606. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Felipe Herrera Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iadbbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.