Effects Analysis Of Carbon Tax Policy And Study On Its Optimized Design Based On Low-carbon Economy In China

Resource environment problems have already become the toughest challengefacing the world in the21st century. How to keep environmental damage andresources consumption to a minimum while developing the economy is being thecommonly concentrated issue around the world. In this context, low-carbon economyhas been emerged as required and increasingly attached importance all over the world.Our government had made the commitment in the Copenhagen conference that is a40-45%reduction in carbon intensity between2005and2020. Setting suchchallenging goals indicate China’s resolve and confidence of low-carbon economicdevelopment. However, as industrialization and urbanization process accelerated inrecent years, China, surpassed America in2007, has already been ahead of the worldin the carbon dioxide emissions. Under a growing pressure to cut carbon emissions,China desperately need to adopt environmental and economic policy both effectivelyand feasibly, in response to the low-carbon economic development characterized bylow-power, low-pollution and low-emissions, which optimizes energy consumptionand industrial structure, as well as reduces greenhouse gas emissions. On September7,2011, the Second Five-year Development Program for energy saving and emissionreduction issued by the State Council clearly put forward, that, achieving the goal ofenergy conservation and emission reduction in the Second Five-year DevelopmentProgram, environmental tax reform should be actively promoted, and environmentalprotection tax be leviedto broaden the tax base gradually, especially in the taxableitems of well-developed technique and challenging tasks. Consequently, carbon tax,as one of main tax categories in environment tax system, will be playing the importantrole of moving to a low carbon development model and achieving emission reductiontargets in the future.although the carbon tax has been widely adopted around the world，especially inEurope and the United States，but China has not yet introduced a carbon tax, which isdisjointed with the development of China’s low-carbon economy. In reference tosuccessful experiences abroad, how to establish the optimized design of carbon taxpolicy to respond to our conditions, has a theoretical and practical significance. Thispaper expounds the connotation of carbon taxation, and explores the models ofinternational carbon tax policy firstly. Then the paper makes further analysis in the development bottlenecks that China’s low carbon economy encounters, especially thenot-yet-created green taxation mechanism and lack of principal taxes, namely carbontax, which highlights the urgency of carbon tax policy China need to construct toserve the low carbon economy. After that, it systematically estimates by some indexesthe carbon tax effects if implemented in the following aspacts: economic effects,emissions-reducing effects, income distribution effects, thereby providing strongsupport in technology and data if implemented. Finally, positioning the targets of boththe sustained economic growth prioritily and carbon-reduction subordinately in thecontext of low-carbon economy, this paper tries to design the institutional frameworkto optimize the path of tax policy in the direction of tax system design, tax privileges,and the use of government taxes, which provides valuable policy proposal for theroles of carbon tax in the development of our low-carbon economy.