Ecological Tax Reform: Many Know Why But Few Know How

Ecological tax reform involves the utilisation of the tax system to facilitate sustainable development. The generally accepted approach to ecological tax reform is to reduce tax rates on income and labour and to impose Pigouvian taxes on resource use and pollution emissions. While this approach is a vast improvement on current tax systems, it is an inadequate means of achieving sustainable development because it relies exclusively on the manipulation of market prices – an allocation instrument – when ecological sustainability is a throughput problem that requires a separate policy instrument to be adequately resolved. With the aid of a linear throughput representation of the economic process, it is argued that conventional ecological tax reform measures promote just two of the five behavioural modes put forward to achieve sustainable development. In order to promote all five behavioural modes, it is argued that ecological tax reform is best conducted with the incorporation of tradeable resource use permits and assurance bonds.