The Research On Energy Tax: General Theory, Experience And System Design

Since the reform and opening up, China has created a miracle which is rapid economic development and improvement of people’s living standards. But behind the miracle, there are lots of side effects, such as low energy efficiency, unoptimized energy structure, energy shortages and environmental pollution. A key challenge in Chinese economic development is to settle all the above issues. As a national overall development strategy and an integral part of the government’s macro-control economic levers, tax should play a pivotal role. From a practical point of view, energy tax has become an important means to solve the energy shortage and environmental issues. Practices of EU Member States and theoretical literature have both shown that energy tax has been an important tool to improve energy efficiency and protect the environment. However, there is no energy tax in China’s current tax system, which is not conducive to play a role of energy tax in energy saving emission reduction and protecting environment.Start with maturing the tax system and protecting the environment, this thesis takes the design of China’s energy tax system as final goal. Firstly, after defining the meaning of energy tax, the thesis combs basic theory on energy tax, details the nature of energy tax and the relationship between energy tax and other energy-related taxes. Secondly, combined with China’s reality, it demonstrates the necessity and feasibility of China’s energy tax, analyzes problems of energy tax in China. Then the thesis interprets the economic effects and mechanism of energy tax, analyzes policy effects of energy tax on energy production and consumption, environmental protection, income distribution, government revenue, employment, competitiveness and economic growth. Based on this, it studies policy effects of China’s refined oil consumption tax, to empirically prove that energy taxes should be levied in China for resolving the issue of energy saving and environmental protection. Thirdly, it introduces the basic details of EU energy tax, especially focusing on energy taxes’ history and current development in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.Then the thesis summarizes the experience of the EU energy tax for providing a reference for the design of China’s energy tax system. Finally, under the overall plan of China’s energy tax system, according to the Chinese energy tax system design principles, the thesis attempts to design tax issues in detail, such as object of taxation, the taxpayer and intermediate links of taxation, the taxation basis, tax rates, tax incentives, tax preference, tax collection and management etc. In order to successfully implement energy tax, the thesis analyzes the influence factors from the perspective of both tax and non-tax, and gives the corresponding policy recommendations.Therefore, whether from the economic point of view of theory or application, it’s very useful to study energy tax, not only becauseit is conducive to develop new energy conservation tools, but also an important exploration to enrich the theory and practice of China tax system. It has certain degree of theoretical and practical significance.