2024-02-17 09:00:12
Taxes are certainly a tool for financing public authorities, but they also constitute a particularly effective tool for managing the decisions made by economic players. The modulation of the burden of taxation, increased for certain activities and reduced for others, aims in fact to favor decisions consistent with the objective pursued by the public decision-maker and to dissuade those which are less so.
The strength of taxation is that it creates the conditions for these signals to be directly followed by effect: the price variations which go hand in hand with the modulation of tax rates naturally tend to discourage the most taxed decisions for the benefit of those whose taxation is reduced. Far from constituting a form of social signal, a “socio-score”, aimed at stigmatizing certain decisions and praising others, taxation thus functions as a control console for the public decision-maker, allowing fine management of economic decisions.
When a municipality decides to vary the cost of parking the most polluting vehicles (and/or which occupy a larger space in public space), it is not, for example, a question of penalizing the owners of these vehicles. The objective is simply to increase the cost of use, so that it becomes more advantageous to make vehicle purchase choices more in line with the objectives of reducing pollution and using space. audience.
The unexpected effects of financial incentives
The effectiveness of taxes, and more generally of financial sanctions, therefore lies in their capacity to shift consumption and production choices towards options which have become more advantageous due to price variations. Current thoughts on the possibility of introducing a tax aimed at penalizing patients who do not honor a medical appointment (known as the “rabbit tax”) are part of the same reasoning.
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Such a measure would be effective if the sanction only modified the financial consequences of such behavior. But a lot of recent research shows that financial incentives have unexpected effects on decisions that include a moral dimension, because they present a significant risk of crowding out these moral motivations in favor of decisions based solely on financial reasoning.
This idea appeared in economic thought during an intense debate between the founding father of social policy research, the British Richard Titmuss (1907-1973), and the most famous economists of the 1970s, who were convinced that market forces applied to all forms of good and asserted, for example, that the introduction of financial rewards for blood donations might only increase the supply.
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