Environmental Policy and Product Specialization

This paper characterizes income and commodity taxation as the outcome of a noncooperative Nash game in a two-country economy where one of the countries produces an environmentally clean good, while the other produces a dirty good. Among the results, it is shown that the commodity tax on the dirty good implemented by each country does not contain any term that directly serves to correct for the external effect. Instead, the country producing the dirty good internalizes part of the domestic external effect by choosing a relatively high marginal income tax rate.