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Begin New Search Publishing Institution Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University

31. Progressive and Regressive Taxation in the United States: Who's Really Paying (and Not Paying) their Fair Share?

Author:
Brian Roach
Publication Date:
12-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
The 2010 debate over extending the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts often focused the fairness of the tax distribution in the United States. Unfortunately, discussions of tax fairness rarely take into account the distribution of the overall tax system, typically focusing only on the federal income tax or on federal taxes without consideration of the state and local tax system. This paper updates a 2003 analysis (Roach, 2003) to present a current assessment of the distribution of all components of the U.S. tax system, including recent trends. The results show that the overall federal tax system is quite progressive. But when state and local taxes are included as well, the overall U.S. tax system is only slightly progressive. Further, most of the progressivity of the overall tax system occurs in the lower half of the income spectrum. At upper-income levels, progressivity levels off and actually reverses at the highest income levels. Median-income taxpayers pay about 25% of their total income in taxes, while taxpayers in the top 1% pay about 31% of their income in taxes. Thus claims that America has a “highly progressive” tax system do not appear to be valid.
Topic:
Economics, Social Stratification, and Monetary Policy
Political Geography:
United States

32. Resources, Rules and International Political Economy: The Politics of Development in the WTO

Author:
Kenneth C. Shadlen
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
This paper examines the contemporary politics of intellectual property (IP) and investment in the World Trade Organization (WTO). I examine the underlying and perennial conflicts that pit developing and developed countries against each other in these two areas and the nature of the two agreements reached during the Uruguay Round, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS). I then analyze developed countries' efforts to push beyond the TRIPS and TRIMS agreements, and, critically, developing countries' success in forestalling these efforts. Developing countries have “prevailed” in the current international conflicts over IP and investment not by securing rules that they desire, but rather by preventing the imposition of arrangements that they regard as worse than the WTO status quo.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Globalization, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance

33. Reforming and Reinforcing the Revolution: The Post-TRIPS Politics of Patents in Latin America

Author:
Kenneth Shadlen
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
National policies toward intellectual property (IP) were revolutionized in the 1990s, as countries adopted new systems to conform to the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). TRIPS-style IP regimes make patents available for more types of knowledge, grant long periods of patent protection, and endow patent owners with strong rights of exclusion. This paper analyzes two contrasting patterns of political mobilization and pressures for change that newly-introduced, TRIPS-style regimes became subject to by the early 21st Century. Most governments faced pressures to address aspects of their IP systems regarding pharmaceutical patents; governments came under pressure to reform their new patent systems, calling into question the appropriateness and utility of broad and strong private rights of exclusion as tools for disseminating knowledge. Most governments also faced pressures to modify aspects of their patent systems more broadly related to science, technology, and indigenous innovation (STI); governments came under pressure to reinforce their new patent systems, buttressing the role of private rights of exclusion as mechanisms to incentivize the creation and distribution of knowledge and technology. I provide a political explanation for the contrasting trajectories of reform and reinforcement by examining how different policy arrangements generate and mobilize interests for continuity and discontinuity. The focus is on asymmetric patterns of interest mobilization: those actors who benefit from policy interventions tend to mobilize more than those who suffer; those actors who suffer retain the capacities for mobilization and resistance more in the area of health-drugs than STI.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Political Economy, and Intellectual Property/Copyright
Political Geography:
Latin America

34. Economic Writing on the Pressing Problems of the Day: The Roles of Moral Intuition and Methodological Confusion

Author:
Julie A. Nelson
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
Economists are often called on to help address pressing problems of the day, yet many economists are uncomfortable about disclosing the values that they bring to this work. This essay explores how an inadequate understanding of the role of methodology, as related to ethics and human emotions of concern, underlies this reluctance and compromises the quality of economic advice. The tension between caring about the problems, on the one hand, and writing within the existing culture of the discipline, on the other, are illustrated with examples from U.S. policymaking, behavioral economics, and the economics of climate change and global poverty. Potential steps towards a more responsible, "strongly objective," and policy-useful economics are discussed.
Topic:
Climate Change, Economics, Globalization, and Poverty
Political Geography:
United States

35. The Environmental Impacts of Soybean Expansion And Infrastructure Development in Brazil's Amazon Basin

Author:
Maria del Carmen Vera-Diaz, Robert K. Kaufmann, and Daniel C. Nepstad
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
For decades, the development of transportation infrastructure in the Brazilian Amazon has been the government's main social and economic development policy in the region. Reductions in transportation costs have not only opened the agricultural frontier to cattle ranching and logging but have also caused more than two-thirds of Amazonian deforestation. Currently, soybean cultivation is a new economic force demanding improvements to roads in the region. Profitable soybean crops have spread over the Mato Grosso's cerrados and now head toward the core of the Amazon rain forest. One of the main constraints for soy expansion into the Amazon has been the poor condition of roads. In this study, we analyze the effect Amazon transportation infrastructure programs have on soybean expansion by lowering transport costs. The analysis is based on spatial estimates of transportation costs for the soybean sector, first using current road networks and then projecting changes based on the paving of the Cuiabá-Santarém road. Our results indicate that paving the Cuiabá-Santarém road would reduce transportation costs by an average of $10 per ton for farmers located in the northern part of Mato Grosso, by allowing producers to reroute soybean shipments to the Santarém port. Paving the road also would expand the area where growing soybeans is economically feasible by about 70 percent, from 120,000 to 205,000 km2 . Most of this new area would be located in the state of Pará and is covered largely by forests. A Cost-Benefit analysis of the road project indicates that the investments in infrastructure would generate more than $180 million for soybean farmers over a period of twenty years. These benefits, however, ignore the project's environmental impacts. If the destruction of ecological services and products provided by the existing forests is accounted for, then the Cuiabá-Santarém investment would generate a net loss of between $762 million and $1.9 billion. This result shows the importance of including the value of the natural capital in feasibility studies of infrastructure projects to reflect their real benefits to society as a whole.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Economics, Environment, and Infrastructure
Political Geography:
Brazil, Latin America, and Amazon Basin

36. Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Ecological and Feminist Economics in Policy Debates

Author:
Julie A. Nelson
Publication Date:
06-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
The field of ecological economics includes both economic analysis on the one hand, and discussions of values and visions for society, on the other. Using feminist insights into cultural beliefs about the relative "hardness" and "softness" of these two sides, this essay discusses how ecological economists can use this unique "between" space in order to better inform policy. The current crisis of global climate change, it is argued, requires that economists move beyond modeling and measurement, while ecological thinkers need to re-examine beliefs about markets and profit.
Topic:
Climate Change, Economics, Environment, and Gender Issues
Political Geography:
United States

37. Agricultural Dumping Under NAFTA: Estimating the Costs of U.S. Agricultural Policies to Mexican Producers

Author:
Timothy A. Wise
Publication Date:
12-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
With the opening of the Mexican economy under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican agriculture came under new competitive pressures from U.S. exports. It was widely recognized at the beginning of NAFTA that Mexico had geographically-based comparative advantages in supplying off-season fruits and vegetables to a hungry U.S. market. NAFTA's liberalization of agricultural trade produced the expected results, with more staple crops and meats flowing south and more seasonal fruits and vegetables flowing north. In agriculture, tariffs and quotas have now mostly been eliminated. Not so agricultural subsidies, which were left largely undisciplined by NAFTA. High U.S. farm subsidies for exported crops, which compete with Mexican products, have prompted charges that the level playing field NAFTA was supposed to create is in fact tilted heavily in favor of the United States.
Topic:
Agriculture, International Trade and Finance, and Treaties and Agreements
Political Geography:
United States and North America

38. Sociology, Economics, and Gender: Can Knowledge of the Past Contribute to a Better Future?

Author:
Julie A. Nelson
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
This essay explores the profoundly gendered nature of the split between the disciplines of economics and sociology which took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emphasizing implications for the relatively new field of economic sociology. Drawing on historical documents and feminist studies of science, it investigates the gendered processes underlying the divergence of the disciplines in definition, method, and degree of engagement with social problems. Economic sociology has the potential to heal this disciplinary split, but only if the field is broadened, deepened, and made wiser and more self-reflective through the use of feminist analysis.
Topic:
Economics, Gender Issues, Political Economy, Political Theory, and Sociology

39. Policies for Funding a Response to Climate Change

Author:
Brian Roach
Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
This paper asserts that a significant increase in public funding for climate change research and development (R) is needed in the United States. While additional public R funding alone is unlikely to provide a sufficient policy response to climate change, it is a critical policy component in an effective long-run strategy. Different possibilities for generating additional public revenues for R funding are considered. The analysis demonstrates that quite modest taxes on carbon emissions or gasoline could fund a significant increase in public R funding for clean energy. As an alternative to tax instruments, the paper also considers a program of voluntary retirement contributions to a clean energy fund. These clean energy retirement accounts (CERAs) would allow individuals to directly contribute to a fund that would be used exclusively to support climate change-related R Specifically, the paper suggests that CERA funds be used to offer low-interest loans to private firms and to form private-public partnerships pursuing the long-term development of clean energy technologies. Loan repayment and the eventual profitability of some partnerships will at least partially fund payments to CERA holders when they retire. Using reasonable assumptions, a simulation analysis demonstrates the financial feasibility of the program and the conditions in which the program would be fully self-funding.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States

40. Ecological Macroeconomics: Consumption, Investment, and Climate Change

Author:
Jonathan Harris
Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
The challenge of reducing global carbon emissions by 50-85 per cent by the year 2050, which is suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007a) as a target compatible with limiting the risk of a more-than-2ºC temperature increase, clearly conflicts with existing patterns of economic growth, which are heavily dependent on increased use of fossil fuel energy. While it is theoretically possible to conceive of economic growth being “delinked” from fossil fuel consumption, any such delinking would represent a drastic change from economic patterns of the last 150 years.
Topic:
Climate Change, Economics, and International Political Economy