TITLE:
Sustainable Development: An Ambitious Target to Be Achieved?
AUTHORS:
Basil Dalamagas, John Leventides, Stefanos Tantos
KEYWORDS:
Sustainable Development, Environmental Policy, Socio-Economic Policy, (In)Direct Taxation, Welfare Maximization
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.13 No.5,
August
31,
2023
ABSTRACT: The aim of the present study is to substantiate the argument that funding
the worldwide environmental efforts for eliminating air pollution from CO2 emission requires transferring a huge amount of additional tax revenue from the
budget of both developed and developing countries. To reach such a conclusion, a
utility function for a sample of eleven countries is chosen to determine an
optimal combination of direct and indirect taxes. This combination is estimated
at different levels of budget constraints to determine an efficient allocation
of resources. The environmental efforts under the general title sustainable
development include ambitious targets, such as climate changes, environmental
degradation, peace, justice and so on. This concept is defined as development
that meets the needs of the present generation without undermining the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs. Given the scarcity of reliable
data measuring the influence of environmental and institutional changes on
economic and social indices, the methodology employed in the present study is
to overcome the problem arising from the complex environmental pillar of
sustainable development and investigate the extent to which the economic and
social pillars are financially compatible, that is if the current size of
government budget can support the proposed reform bill. Since we demonstrate
that such a support appears to be hardly attainable, it is redundant to include
environmental issues in our analysis.