Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
e.g., about federal budget priorities, tax policy, discount rates, available data,
modeling assumptions, etc.
As my experience illustrates, informing policy decisions free of unintended bias
may be most productive in principle by articulating the consequences of alternative
actions without suggesting the policy decision. For example, if an objective is to
accelerate the role of clean energy technologies to mitigate climate change impacts
or other objectives, there are many policy pathways, and analyzing the implications
of a range of them has considerable value. If a particular pathway is recommended,
however, it is important to gauge the degree to which that recommendation hinges
on assumptions about the policy context or other factors.
As an example, extending illustrations in energy policy, if government is consid-
ering policy mechanisms for reducing the nation's dependence on imported
oil, economists will argue generally that market-based mechanisms, such as a tax,
comprise by far the most efficient means in terms of internalizing non-market costs
to the economy such as national security or environmental benefits of reduced
oil use. Historically, however, public aversion to tax increases of any kind in the
United States has often rendered such pathways problematic. For example, at various
times over the past three decades the prospects of increasing the federal gasoline
tax have been put forward in the Congress in an effort to better capture environmen-
tal, national security, and other economic costs not captured in fuel markets, but
such efforts have virtually always been shouted down in a public backlash.
Even if mechanisms to better capture market externalities in the form of increas-
ing prices become feasible politically, many other issues remain, such as regressiv-
ity of the proposed tax, regional differences in patterns of gasoline demand or
vehicle miles travelled or other economic impacts, and other factors that are often
well outside the scope of an analysis designed to measure success in terms of
reduced oil use. For example, in recent debates about the prospects of a carbon tax
to internalize the long term costs of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, the
issue of regressivity has seldom become a significant factor in the debate.
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13.4
Regional Science Applications: Illustration Using
Generalized Input-Output Analysis
A commonly posed public policy analysis problem familiar to regional scientists is
to analyze the implications of a new spending program (usually government, but
certainly not exclusively so) on an economy, which may involve comprehensive
examination of a wide variety of factors associated with that spending program,
such as impacts on employment, pollution, infrastructure utilization, or capital
expenditures. In the following a general framework expanded from Leontief's
basic input-output analysis formulation is applied for tracing these impacts
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While the discussion of regressivity has been often absent from this policy debate, analysis of the
topic is not, such as in Parry et al. (
2005
) or Oladosu and Rose (
2007
).
