H23 - Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and SubsidiesReturn

Climate change and climate neutrality targets for 2050 in the case of the EU bring the need for effective environmental policy instruments. Environmental taxes, green innovations, carbon pricing, emission allowances and other instruments are attracting increasing attention in academic as well as economic and environmental policy debates. This paper provides a detailed review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of policy instruments in the path towards climate neutrality, in particular on the effectiveness of environmental taxes, innovations, and established policies across the globe. A separate section also examines the two most widely used approaches for putting a price on carbon – carbon taxes and emission allowances. Environmental policy instruments are combined, however, none of them alone contributes to significant environmental improvements, as confirmed by several major studies. But stricter regulation and improved instruments go a long way towards achieving climate neutrality.

The burning issue within the pension system in the Czech Republic is the level of coverage of self-employed persons. According to the data, they constantly report their income near the level of minimal basis during their lifetime. We estimate the replacement rates, lifetime benefit and lifetime contribution index using updated unique dataset of Assessment Base for Pension Insurance to shed the light on this problem. We can sum up that the income distribution of self-employed persons is highly concentrated, with the peak at the profit level which corresponds with the minimal base for pension contribution. Due to the high degree of the Czech pension system progressivity, the general result is that the self-employed persons are better off in comparisons with the employees if we concentrate on relative measures, but worst off if we concentrate on nominal measures. The only way how to solve this puzzle may be the effective information campaign which will reveal the future level of pensions /replacement rates/ to encourage the self-employed persons to participate in other, broadly defined, pillars of pension system.

Using analytical tool "safely untaxed tax base" we estimate redistributive impact of proposed changes in personal income taxation based on the plans of the Czech Social Democratic Party. We also compare impacts of other potential variants of changes in the basic elements of tax technique (reintroduction of the concept of gross wages, changes in the structure of nominal rates, adjustments in the basic personal tax credit). According to the legislation in 2017, 25 % of employees do not pay income tax due to the generous tax credit (and 72 % of all self-employed persons). Returning to the tax system of 2007 (which was based on the concept of "gross wage", lower tax credit and progressive tax rates) would lead to a significant reduction in the number of people with zero tax (as a result there would be only a few percent). By using the knowledge of behavioral economics, it can be deduced that this may lead to more significant efforts for more intense tax planning. Far-reaching and hardly predictable social or retirement consequences can be deduced.

The aim of this paper is to find out how the tax-benefit system in the Czech Republic contributed to progressivity of income distribution between years 2004 and 2014. Analysis was done by comparing Lorenz curves, Gini coefficient and index of effective progressivity. Indicators were designed for different income situations caused by taxation, social insurance and social incomes. It was found, that setting of the tax-benefit system progressively affected the distribution of household incomes. Level of progression had constant values. The most important tools are in a long-term period social incomes (pensions and welfare benefits) and taxes, which can be reasonably regarded as a progressive factor especially in case of using a tax bonus.

The paper deals with the issue of environmental taxes. It focuses on the energy taxes, which are introduced by Directive 2003/96/ES. The paper discusses the electricity tax in the Czech Republic. These taxes are compared with the tax in other EU states. The next part is focused on electricity prices and components of electricity. The paper deals with income effect. The substitution effect is only mentioned. Thank regression analysis is analysed relationship between price of electricity and electricity taxes. The paper deals with the electricity tax and its impact on renewable energy. The main goal is analyzed the impact of taxation on electricity to its price and renewable energy development.

The paper is based on a scientific article in which the authors tested the hypothesis that when the system of health insurance has ceiling and is used as the main source of financing health care, so it has regressive effect on redistribution. This statement is verified on public health insurance in the Czech Republic in 2011. This question is very current today in the Czech Republic due to a possible re-introduction of a maximum assessment base and its potential impact on redistribution. The thesis also discusses other insured persons - self-employed persons, persons without taxable income and state insured persons. In the last part is analyzed the redistributive effect of taxes and social insurance.

Consumption taxes are traditional source of public revenue in the Czech Republic and have been the second largest source of leakage of households' finance in the last decade following the social security contributions. However there is a lack of the precise redistributional analyses of the consumption taxation on individual/household level because of no suitable microsimulation model for the Czech Republic. This paper focuses on the construction of the static microsimulation model capable estimates individual VAT burden using data from the Czech Household Survey. This model is possible to be used in area of redistributional analysis of the tax reforms or in identification of statistically significant variables influencing tax burden.