Tertiary ICT enrolments and job vacancies: Reflecting on trends

Tertiary enrolments in ICT diploma and degree programmes are increasing from the 2007 lows, but at a rate insufficient to meet an increasing global demand. This impending shortage of knowledge and skills, which threatens the viability of the industry, is acknowledged by both industry leaders and by governments. The ICT monthly trend series, established in September 2010 on the CITRENZ (Computing & Information Technology Research & Education NZ) website, highlights NZ ICT education and job advert trends. Brief excerpts from selected news items are also included each month. These help give some insights into the reasons for the current and impending ICT skills shortages and suggest strategies for addressing the problem. This poster features selected extracts from the monthly trend series, with commentary, over the last 12 months

Prices vs. Quantities vs. Tradable Quantities

This paper extends Weitzman's (1974) seminal paper comparing price and quantity instruments for regulation to consider a third option: tradable quantity regulations, such as tradable permits. Contrary to what prior work has suggested, fixed quantities may be more efficient than tradable quantities if the regulated goods are not perfect substitutes, even when trading ratios are based on the ratio of expected marginal benefits between goods, not simply one-for-one. Indeed, when benefits are independent across goods, or when the goods are complements, tradable quantities are never the most efficient instrument. This theory is applied to dynamic pollution problems, and suggests that permit banking should be allowed for stock pollutants, but not for flow pollutants. These results indicate that many regulations, including the current sulfur dioxide trading program and proposed greenhouse gas regulations, are inefficient.

Environmental Tax Interactions When Pollution Affects Health or Productivity

Numerous recent studies have indicated that interactions with a tax-distorted labor market increase the cost of pollution regulation. However, these studies have made restrictive assumptions regarding individual preferences and have ignored key links between pollution, human health, and labor productivity. Together, these assumptions imply that the benefits of regulation do not affect labor supply. This paper develops an analytically tractable general equilibrium model that allows regulation to provide benefits through several different channels, including improved health or productivity. The model shows that when the benefits of reduced pollution come in the form of improved health or productivity, the benefits do affect labor supply, and therefore create a benefit-side tax-interaction effect in addition to the familiar cost-side interaction. This effect can magnify or diminish the benefits of reduced pollution. When reduced pollution boosts labor productivity, the effect substantially magnifies such benefits. When pollution affects consumer health, the effect will tend to be opposite, diminishing the benefits of reduced pollution. This result is of far more than just theoretical interest; the benefit-side interaction is of the same magnitude as the cost-side interaction, and thus can fundamentally affect the optimal level of regulation. The paper considers only environmental regulation, but the concepts developed here apply equally to other policies affecting productivity or health, such as research subsidies or occupational safety regulations.

Health Effects in a Model of Second-Best Environmental Taxation or Reconsidering "Reconsidering the Tax-Interaction Effect"

The literature on environmental taxation in the presence of pre-existing distortionary taxes has shown that the interactions with pre-existing taxes tend to raise the cost of an environmental tax, and thus that the optimal environmental tax in that context is less than marginal environmental damages. A recent paper by Schwartz and Repetto (2000) challenges this finding, arguing that the health benefits from reduced pollution will also interact with pre-existing taxes, possibly causing the optimal environmental tax to exceed marginal environmental damages. Schwartz and Repetto's analysis aimed to account for health effects by representing environmental quality and leisure as substitutes in utility. The present paper employs an analytically tractable general equilibrium model that, in contrast with Schwartz and Repetto's analysis, explicitly considers health effects. It shows that interactions with health effects from pollution actually will tend to reduce the optimal environmental tax. This result contradicts Schwartz and Repetto's conclusion. This demonstrates the usefulness of explicitly modeling health effects, and it reinforces the general notion that tax-interactions tend to raise the costs of an environmental tax.

Changes to the Tax Exclusion of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Premiums: A Potential Source of Financing for Health Reform

Examines eight options for limiting the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance premiums. Compares, by income level, estimated effects of various caps and indices on tax revenues and after-tax incomes in the first year and over ten years

Estimates from a Consumer Demand System: Implications for the Incidence of Environmental Taxes

Most studies suggest that environmental taxes are regressive, and thus are unattractive policy options. We consider the distributional effects of a gasoline tax increase using three welfare measures and under three scenarios for gas tax revenue use. To incorporate behavioral responses we use Consumer Expenditure Survey data to estimate a consumer demand system that includes gasoline, other goods, and leisure. We find that the gas tax is regressive, but that returning the revenue through a lump-sum transfer more than offsets this, yielding a net increase in progressivity. We also find that ignoring behavioral changes in distributional calculations overstates both the overall burden of the tax and its regressivity.

The Usual Excess-Burden Approximation Usually Doesn't Come Close

This paper shows that the usual excess-burden triangle' formula performs poorly when used to assess the excess burden from taxes on intermediate inputs or consumer goods, and derives a practical alternative to this formula. We use an analytically tractable general equilibrium model to reveal how interactions with pre-existing taxes in other markets critically affect the excess burden of new taxes on intermediate inputs or consumer goods. The usual excess-burden formula ignores these interactions, and consequently yields highly inaccurate assessments of excess burden. Prior economic theory implicitly acknowledges the relevance of general-equilibrium interactions to excess burden, but does not indicate which interactions are most important or reveal the fundamental (first-order) contribution of these interactions. Moreover, prior studies do not offer a practical alternative to the usual excess-burden approximation. This paper helps fill the gap between theory and practice. First, it shows analytically that the importance of the interaction with a given pre-existing tax is roughly proportional to the amount of revenue raised by that tax. Second, the paper derives a practical alternative formula for approximating the excess burden from a commodity tax. Finally, it performs numerical simulations to illustrate the significance of adopting our alternative to the usual approximation formula. For realistic parameter values and a wide range of assumed rates for prior taxes, the usual formula captures less than half of the excess burden of taxes on commodities. When the rate of the new tax is small,' this formula captures less than five percent of the true excess burden. In contrast, the alternative approximation formula derived here yields estimates that are consistently within five percent of the actual excess burden.

Empirical Estimates for Environmental Policy Making in a Second- Best Setting

This study estimates parameters necessary to calculate the optimal second-best gasoline tax, most notably the cross-price elasticity between gasoline and leisure. Prior work indicates that in a second-best setting with distortionary income taxes, both the cost of environmental regulation and the optimal environmental tax rate depend crucially on the cross-price elasticity between a polluting good and leisure. However, no prior study on second-best environmental regulation has estimated this elasticity. Using household data, we find that gasoline is a relative complement to leisure, and thus that the optimal gasoline tax is significantly higher than marginal damages–the opposite of the result suggested by the prior literature. Following this approach to estimate cross-price elasticities with leisure for other major polluting goods could strongly influence estimates of optimal environmental taxes.second-best environmental taxes, optimal taxes, tax interactions, demand system

Curbing Tax Expenditures

Reviews trends in tax expenditures and their effects and examines three options for raising tax revenue by applying limits to large and widely utilized tax preferences: a fixed percentage credit, a cap based on income, and a constant percentage reduction

STAR courses: An effective marketing tool, or a community service?

What are the primary objectives of the Secondary Tertiary Alignment Resource (STAR), in terms of both the national and regional focus? STAR, funded by the NZ Ministry of Education (MoE), has been assisting NZ secondary schools to better meet the needs of year 11-13 students since the mid to late 1990s. The Wintec School of IT commenced its participation with STAR in 2009 by providing an interactive multimedia technologies taster course. The following year an additional taster course, games programming, was added. This poster reviews the impact of STAR enrolments for the Wintec School of IT, in terms of student progression onto full time certificate, diploma and degree programmes