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It is well understood that a tax which distorts relative prices generates a welfare cost or "excess burden" in addition to any associated transfer of resources, but there remains considerable controversy and confusion with respect to procedures for measuring this excess burden. The purpose of this paper is to clarify matters concerning what is one of the most basic concepts in welfare economics. We describe and evaluate a number of alternative conceptual experiments which might lie behind an excess burden calculation, showing how these notions can be represented graphically and algebraically and how they can be approximated numerically.
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It is argued that changes in workers' budget sets cannot explain the dramatic increases in" civilian work in the U.S. during World War II. Although money wages grew during the period wartime after-tax real wages were lower than either before or after the war. Evidence from the" 1940's also appears to be inconsistent with other pecuniary explanations such as wealth effects of" government policies, intertemporal substitution induced by asset prices and changes in the nonmarket price of time. Although untested and relatively undeveloped nonpecuniary models of behavior are tempting explanations for wartime work."
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In a recent article in this Journal, Robin Boadway has argued that the appropriate requirement for neutrality is that the present value of the returns from an initial investment of [1pound], using the social discount rate, should be equal for all projects undertaken at the margin. We have few qualifications about this approach itself; although discounting with the social rate of time preference (STP) may be inappropriate in the current context. However, we would take issue with two aspects of Boadwav's application of his view of neutrality. The first problem concerns the appropriate definition of the constraint on firm leverage which would arise from the existence of limited liability. We believe Boadway's assumption to be inappropriate, and find that its replacement with what we argue to be the correct one leads to important revisions in evaluating the neutrality of different incentives. Another point we would make is that Boadway's results depend crucially on the absence of both personal taxes and inflation. We argue below that once realistic account has been taken of these important elements of the problem, general results about the neutrality of different incentives can no longer be derived, so that while Boadway's criterion may be appropriate, its application promises to be very difficult.
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Cameroon is among the more prosperous countries in Africa, thanks to relatively abundant agricultural land and offshore petroleum. These spurred an economic boom from unification of the country in 1972 until 1986, which was followed by a decade of decline from 1986 to 1995 and a limited recovery since then. Prior to the economic crisis of the late 1980s, Cameroon's development strategy efforts were managed through a series of five-year development plans. In these, agriculture was described as the priority sector and the government intervened massively in rural development, both directly through the establishment of state-owned agro-industries, rural corporations and settlements, and also indirectly through various support programs. Later reforms and the devaluation of 1994 improved performance through allowing more market incentives to play a role. In this chapter the authors use the methodology of Anderson et al. (2008) to quantify the evolution of those distortions to farmer incentives, measuring the incidence of government policy on producers and consumers each year in Cameroon from 1961 to 2004. For each of the major activities we compute Nominal Rates of Assistance (NRAs), which are then aggregated into a variety of other indexes. The chapter is organized as follows. The next section provides a brief overview of agriculture's role in the economy. A summary of the main agricultural policy incentives, interventions and reforms is then provided, before describing the country's growth performance over time. The main section computes and analyzes government distortions to agricultural incentives, and the concluding section speculates on prospects for future policy reform.
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