Revenue-Neutral Environmental Tariff Reform, Growth, and Welfare

Abstract

This paper analyzes the growth and welfare effects of revenue-neutral tariff reform in a small open endogenous growth model with environmental externalities. As is the case in countries that depend primarily on imported energy, the employment of a foreign intermediate good causes negative environmental externalities in production. This paper shows that substituting a tariff on the foreign intermediate good for a tariff on the foreign consumption good in a revenue-neutral way raises the growth rate and the welfare, if the environmental externality is sufficiently strong and if the elasticity of substitution between inputs lies within a certain range.