Documents wealth 120 results

"La crise écologique et financière oblige les décideurs à se pencher sur les scénarios de sortie de crise verte. Mais cette prise de conscience court le risque de s'arrêter à mi-chemin. « Capitalisme vert », « croissance verte », « keynésianisme vert » et « technologies propres » constituent autant de confortables mirages destinés à nous épargner les nécessaires remises en cause liées aux limites écologiques d'une planète aux ressources finies. La prise en compte conséquente de ces limites amène à aborder de front la question des inégalités écologiques et sociales et à changer les modes de production, de consommation et donc les modes de vie les plus prédateurs. Sans autre échappatoire, dans cette redistribution des richesses à opérer, que la redéfinition collective du sens de ces richesses elles-mêmes."

"What do we want from economic growth? What sort of a society are we aiming for? In everyday economics, there is no such thing as enough, or too much, growth. Yet in the world's most developed countries, growth has already brought unrivalled prosperity: we have `arrived'. More than that, through debt, inequality, climate change and fractured politics, the fruits of growth may rot before everyone has a chance to enjoy them. It's high time to ask where progress is taking us, and are we nearly there yet?
In fact, Trebeck and Williams claim in this ground-breaking book, the challenge is now to make ourselves at home with this wealth, to ensure, in the interests of equality, that everyone is included. They explore the possibility of `Arrival', urging us to move from enlarging the economy to improving it, and the benefits this would bring for all."

"This paper assesses the drivers of wealth inequality. While inequality between skilled and unskilled workers is due to differences in educational attainment, within-group inequality is due to differences in productivity across firms. Workers in more successful firms are paid more than their peers with the same level of education and skills in less successful firms.
Out of four major structural changes affecting the US economy – namely a rising share of skilled workers, skill-biased technological change, decreasing progressiveness of taxation and productivity slowdown – we show that the decline in productivity growth not only is the main driver of the widening wealth disparities observed in the United States of America over the past few decades, but is also the only mechanism that can explain inequalities both within and between skill groups."

"Past CO2 emissions have been causing social costs and continue to reduce wealth in the future. Countries differ considerably in their amounts and time profiles of past CO2 emissions. Here we calibrate an integrated assessment model on past economic and climate development to estimate the historical time series of social costs of carbon and to assess how much individual countries have reduced global wealth by their fossil and industrial-process CO2 emissions from 1950 to 2018. Historical social costs of carbon quantify the long-lasting wealth reduction by past CO2 emissions, which we term ‘climate wealth borrowing', as economic output has been generated at the expense of future climate damages. We find that the United States and China have been responsible for the largest shares of global climate wealth borrowing since 1950, while the per-capita pattern is quite different."

"This paper reviews recent developments in the theory and practice of optimal capital taxation. We emphasize three main rationales for capital taxation. First, the frontier between capital and labour income flows is often fuzzy, thereby lending support to a broad-based, comprehensive income tax. Next, the very notions of income and consumption flows are difficult to define and measure for top wealth holders where capital gains due to asset price effects dwarf ordinary income and consumption flows. Therefore the proper way to tax billionaires is a progressive wealth tax. Finally, as individuals cannot choose their parents, there are strong meritocratic reasons why we should tax inherited wealth more than earned income or self-made wealth for which individuals can be held responsible, at least in part. This implies that the ideal fiscal system should also include a progressive inheritance tax, in addition to progressive income and wealth taxes. We then confront our prescriptions with historical experience. Although there are significant differences, we argue that observed fiscal systems in modern democracies bear important similarities with this ideal triptych."

"This paper considers the role of capital gains taxation in enhancing tax progressivity, and argues that capital gains are the Achilles' heel of taxing the rich more effectively. We revisit the key aspects of how capital gains are taxed and address the main arguments against taxing capital gains more heavily: (i) it would discourage socially beneficial activities, such as innovation, (ii) implementing structural changes is unadministrable, and (iii) the ‘lock-in' effect means that increasing the tax rate is an inefficient way to raise revenue. To address concerns with the unpopularity of taxing unrealized gains during one's lifetime and retroactive taxes, we conclude with a partial proposal for constructive realization at death that would apply only to gains accrued after a certain date, while allowing for discounted pre-payments of tax liability."

"Capitalism's sustained failures to address popular needs, hopes, and fears have led to a delegitimation of state institutions and mainstream political parties. The crisis is consequently not primarily economic but social and political. The pandemic further exposed capitalism's social irrationalities, intimated how unprepared we were for the much larger environmental pandemic to come, and generated a new level of empathy for the value of frontline workers and the workplace health risks they are exposed to. Building on these openings requires identifying a few key demands around which to unify fragmented social movements; acquiring new understandings; placing larger issues of property rights and democracy on the agenda; and creating workplace, local, and national organizations with the capacity to realize substantive change. The strategic demands the article suggests and elaborates are an emergency wealth tax, conversion of industrial capacity for environmental reconstruction, and the strengthening of unions as a social force."

"The COVID-19 crisis has amplified the urgency of addressing together the dual challenges of inequality and environmental degradation. This paper contributes to the debate on the inequalities-environment nexus by analysing the consequences of the environmental degradation and of environmental policies on four well-being dimensions: health, income and wealth, work and job quality, and safety. The analysis shows that the impacts of environmental degradation tends to be concentrated among vulnerable groups and households. At the same, the benefits and costs of environmental policies are also likely to be unevenly distributed across households. In this context, policy packages for an inclusive green transition should aim at: (i) mitigating the possible regressive impact of pricing environmental externalities, (ii) investing in human capital and upgrading skills to facilitate labour reallocation, (iii) addressing systemic inequalities with sectoral and place-based policies, (iv) ensuring efficient and responsive governance. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for an effective framework to measure progress towards a people-centred green recovery, and possible areas of future work."