The Economic Impact Of Environmental Tax In Our Country And The Reform Research

Along with the reform and opening-up, China’s achievement of economic development attracts worldwide attention. However, the extensive mode of development with high environmental costs lead to the edge contradiction between long term economic growth and environmental carrying capacity, the gap between increasing growing of public environmental demand and environmental status become obvious, environmental problem which the developing countries experienced in the past century has been glaring with condensed and compound type. Environmental protection needs the joint macro-control of legislation, administrative and economic means. Economic means has been the most effective long-term mechanism to solve the environmental problems in the world. Domestic and overseas theoretical research and government place great hope on the environmental taxation and fee. Market players are sensitive to the regulation of taxation and fee which is broader and fairer. It is necessary and urgent to make overall plans and take the capacity of resource, environment and enterprises into consideration, formulate environmental tax and fee policy which adapts to the needs of China’s national conditions and the current economic development in order to play its role of guidance and regulative function as an economic lever. Therefore, it is with great theoretical and practical significance to study the influence of environmental taxation and fee on the economy and the reform of environmental taxation and fee.The severe environment situation and the construction of ecological civilization lead to the thinking about the important position and role of environmental tax and fee policy in the sustainable development. Based on the comprehensive analysis and review of relative domestic and overseas literature, it discusses and defines environment, environment fee, environmental taxation and sustainable development, employs sustainable development theory, externality theory, theory of public goods, the theory of optimizing tax system, Pigovian tax and Coase theorem to expound the theoretical foundation of environmental taxation and fee, these theories are applicable to China’s practice. On the basis of the investigation, it differentiates environmental taxation and environmental fee, summarizes the categories of China’s current environmental fee, projects and their implementation, concludes and evaluates the mechanism and real effect of environmental taxation and fee, analyzes the problems and reasons of the design and implementation of environmental taxation and fee. The current situation is that the environmental fee is the main measure and environmental taxation as supplement, there is no independent taxation regulation and control means, the existing taxation system hasn’t considered enough environmental factors, the relationship between taxation and fee is not harmonious. Meanwhile, the system hasn’t covered the overall process of production, circulation and consumption, the adjustable range and power is not enough, the policy implementation is not in place, it is difficult to form resultant force. Thus it is necessary to push the integration of environmental taxation and fee in China. Combining the "double dividend" hypothesis, choosing resource taxation and pollutant discharge fee as the model samples, using penal data about finance, economy and environment of17cities in Shandong Province, the econometric model is employed to analyze the effect of environmental taxation and fee on economic growth, income distribution and industrial structure optimization, comprehensively evaluate the harmonious development of environmental taxation and fee and finance and economy, test the long term stability relationship between them. The empirical analysis suggests that the environmental taxation and fee will do more good than bad, there is little impact on economic growth and price level, but much benefit for promoting the adjustment of economic structure and economic sustainable development.Summarizing the design of environmental taxation and fee and the reform experience of the United States, Japan, Holland and other OECD countries as well as Taiwan Region and Jiangsu, Shanxi province, an integration system of environmental taxation and fee should be established to decrease the ratio of fees and mainly use the taxation measure to improve the system of environmental taxation and fee in China. On the one hand, to meet the demand of resource and energy saving and ecological environment protection, current taxation system should be improved with the structural reduction of taxation and fees. The tax categories such as resource tax and consumption tax should embody more environmental protection requirements and the main tax category should be further improved. At the same time, environmental fee still plays an irreplaceable role in China, so we should optimize the environmental fee policy, strengthen the environmental fee administration and put forward to the suggests about the management of environmental fee such as sewage treatment fee. On the other hand, the government should actively promote the process of transforming administrative fees into taxes, gradually expand the incidence of taxation and increase the tax, construct the environmental taxation system with Chinese characteristic and independent environmental taxation and other taxes and fees as supplement. According to the latest policy trend of the central committee about environmental taxation and fee reform, this study put forwards to an overall framework of constructing the environmental protection taxation system, designs concrete proposal of environmental taxation including taxpayer, incidence of taxation, tax basis, tax items, tax rate and tax preference, comes up with basic concept and operation steps of the reform of environmental taxation and fee.The perfect system of environmental taxation and fee requires high degree of marketization and perfect supporting facilities. Perfect system of environmental taxation and fee needs to give full play to the fundamental role of market mechanism, support the reform of related areas and key links, keep on improving the environmental public finance system, establishing a sound system of the state-owned resources paid use, carrying forward emissions trading, building the ecological compensation system, straitening out pricing mechanism, deepening the environmental financial service policy, strengthening the guiding function of industrial policy together with the marketization reform of related areas, forming an internal mechanism with scientific combination of various policy instruments, complementary advantages, organic linking and co-ordination, and then providing a favorable system and mechanism environment in order to protect ecological environment and maintain sustainable economic development.