Virtually all fiscal measures influence people's health, through their impacts on behaviour, consumption, income and wealth. A narrow subset of fiscal measures, however, can be more directly aimed at improving health by targeting behaviours and risks that are known to be strongly associated with health outcomes. The purpose of this book is to discuss the subject of these measures, which we define as 'health taxes'. The book aims to enumerate key health taxes of interest, explore their positive and negative effects, and how these effects are influenced by the design of these taxes and the context in which they are applied. We ask how and where they can be implemented. Critically, we build an argument throughout the book for why policymakers across government should care about health taxes.

In Progress and Poverty, economist Henry George scrutinizes the connection between population growth and distribution of wealth in the economy of the late nineteenth century. The initial portions of the book are occupied with refuting the demographic theories of Thomas Malthus, who asserted that the vast abundance of goods generated by an economy's growth was spent on food. Consequently the population rises, keeping living standards low, poverty widespread, and starvation and disease common. Henry George had a different attitude: that poverty could be solved and economic progress preserved. To prove this, he draws upon decades of data which show that the increase in land prices restrains the amount of production on said land; business owners thus have less to pay their workers, with the result being mass poverty especially within cities.

Gordon Brown was a past-master at sneaking in new taxes by stealth, but his efforts as Chancellor and then Prime Minister were merely the latest in a long line of party leaders desperate to extract more money from reluctant taxpayers. This book challenges the need for government to resort to such underhand practices which undermine the economy, killing the goose which lays the golden eggs, and the integrity of the political process. The author argues that not only does taxation flout the principle of private property, but it 'is a primal cause of both inflation and unemployment. Regardless of this, the freely elected governments of contemporary trading economies - with the acquiescence of their electorates - persist in raising the major part, if not all, of their revenues by means of taxation. The immediate cause of such action by governments...is ignorance of any acceptable alternative method of raising sufficient public revenue.' Burgess shows how the development of Keynes' general theory of employment 'leads to the conclusion that an open trading economy is likely to be most competitive, and therefore most prosperous, only when taxation is abolished' - but government must be funded. How can this be done without taxation? To provide an answer he refines Alfred Marshall's distinction between the public and private value of property to reveal an alternative, peculiarly public source of revenue. Unlike a tax, defined by a former Labour Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, as 'a compulsory contribution imposed by a public authority, irrespective of the exact amount of service rendered to the taxpayer in return', the 'public value' identified by Marshall would deliver an exact equivalence between the benefits enjoyed and the amount paid. On the basis of this widely accepted definition, therefore, it is not a tax but the price for services rendered like any other transaction - the price fixed by the market. The author shows how reform may be introduced with a minimum of disruption, so that politicians with an eye to re-election can achieve measurable results during the lifetime of a parliament.

This volume presents Richard Blundell's outstanding research on the modern economic analysis of labor markets and public policy reforms. Professor Blundell's hugely influential work has enhanced greatly our understanding of how individuals' behavior on the labor market respond to taxation and social policy influence. Edited by IZA, this volume brings together the author's key papers, some co-authored and some unpublished, with new introductions and an epilogue. It covers some of the main research insights in the study of labor supply. The question of how individuals adapt their behavior in response to policy changes is one of the most investigated topics in empirical labor and public economics. Do people reduce their working hours if governments decide to raise taxes? Might they even withdraw completely from the labor market? Labor supply estimations are extensively used for various policy analyses and economic research. Labor supply elasticities are key information when evaluating tax-benefit policy reforms and their effect on tax revenue, employment, and redistribution. The chapters cover empirical and theoretical developments as well as applications to tax and welfare reform, and each represents a substantive research contribution from Blundell's publications in top research outlets.

Environmental taxes differ from each other according to the functions they serve and the manner in which they are implemented. This study highlights the appropriateness of different kinds of environmental taxes against a rigorous framework of theory and case study evidence. The purpose of this book is to analyse the way in which environmental taxes are categorized and which factors affect the effectiveness and efficiency of the different kinds of environmental taxes in practice. This pragmatic approach is emphasized along with the multiplicity of regulatory problems such as: At what level should the environmental tax rate be set? What is the proper time schedule for introducing an environmental tax? What are the most appropriate taxable characteristics and how should they be determined? What activities should be exempt from environmental taxation? How can tax relief be implemented? These are only some of the regulatory problems explored in this study, which also encompasses an examination of the theory of regulation. The author argues that economists have often paid too little attention to the administrative and legal issues concerning the implementation of legislation, such as environmental tax laws, which are of course vital to the success of any potential policy. Lawyers too have in turn neglected the theory of regulation, which would assist in analysing problems in a future-oriented way. Environmental Taxes will therefore be of great interest to a wide audience of environmental economists, law and economics scholars as well as policymakers.