The Impacts of Environmental Tax in China: A Dynamic Recursive Multi-Sector CGE Model

In recent years, the accumulated environmental problems resulting from excessive usage of fossil fuels have gradually loomed. Thus, an environmental tax, as an important policy tool, has been put on the agenda in China. In this paper, a dynamic recursive multi-sector Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model is applied to explore the impacts of the environmental tax on China’s economy. To comprehensively analyze the impacts, we introduce four kinds of typical contaminants and set two kinds of scenarios: different tax rates and different tax refunds. The results show that the environmental tax is conducive to environmental improvement, but the economic variables are adversely affected, for example, the loss of GDP at the low level tax rate is 0.46%. In order to offset the negative impacts, we presume the government refunds the tax. The results show that this can indeed relieve the negative effects. When the government refunds the production tax and corporate income tax, 0.49% and 0.34% of GDP is relieved by respectively. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the implementation of the environmental tax in China and lays a solid foundation for the introduction of the environmental tax.