Efficiency Costs of Meeting Industry-Distributional Constraints under Environmental Permits and Taxes

A politically realistic approach to environmental policy seems to require avoiding significant profit-losses in major pollution-related industries. The government can avoid such losses by freely allocating some emissions permits or by exempting some inframarginal emissions from a pollution tax. However, preventing profit-losses in this way involves an efficiency cost because it compels the government to forego especially efficient sources of revenue and to rely more heavily on ordinary, distortionary taxes. Using analytically and numerically solved equilibrium models, we analyze these efficiency costs. We find that when the required amount of abatement is small, the efficiency cost implied by the profits-constraint dwarfs the other efficiency costs of pollution-control. When the abatement requirement becomes more extensive, the cost of this constraint diminishes relative to the other efficiency costs. We also calculate and analyze the determinants of the gross compensation ratio' the share of pollution permits that must be freely allocated to prevent profit-losses in the targeted industries. Numerical simulations of sulfur dioxide pollution-control suggest that the Bush Administration's Clear Skies Initiative would exceed this ratio, freely allocating more permits than necessary to preserve profits.

Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create