Time for a tax on dogs?

Is it time to levy a tax on the 10 million pooches in the UK? Chief Examiner Robert Nutter has examined this issue in the latest edition of economax, our digital magazine for A Level Economics students and teachers. You can download this excellent piece here.

Robert’s economax article is one of 8 new resources just added to economax. A summary of the new articles is provided below.

Is Globalisation over-hyped? (Tom White)
Pankaj Ghemawat of IESE Business School has spent more than a decade engaged in statistical analysis of globalisation. The results are a shock: many indicators of global integration are surprisingly low.

Will Australia’s boom turn to bust? (Tom White)
How long will the commodity boom last? Demand should continue to strengthen as emerging markets require more steel, food and fuel. Australia is a vital commodities supplier and has weathered the global recession with scarcely a scratch. What comes next?

Unemployment in the United Kingdom (Andy Reeve)
Unemployment in the United Kingdom is at its highest level since 1994, according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics. The figures, which related to February 2011, showed that an additional 27,000 were unemployed over the quarter, taking the total to 2.53 million.

Cooperation rules in the Italian Province of Emilia-Romagna (Mark Johnston)
The northern Italian province of Emilia- Romagna is possible best known as the birthplace of the slow food movement, a movement which symbolises the idea of quality over quantity. With a population of just over four and half million the province has one of the highest levels of GDP per capita in Italy and was recently ranked second with regard to the quality of life.

Shop local – save the economy! (Ruth Tarrant)
Supermarkets are seen by many in the UK as absolutely fundamental to surviving modern living, due to the convenience of 24 hour grocery shopping combined with a bewildering choice in a price-competitive oligopoly. The ability to access Fairtrade goods with ease, be encouraged to re-use your own bags and buy ‘Forest Friendly’ toilet-roll appeases many shoppers (me included) who occasionally have pangs of doubt about the social responsibility we share by buying from mega-businesses. However, some recent research findings into the economic disadvantages of buying from supermarkets rather than ‘buying local’ will potentially change the way that consumers do their weekly grocery shop.

Obesity and diminishing returns (Mark Johnston)
Obesity it turns out is actually good for the economy. More consumption of food, particularly processed food, contributes to more economic growth. Poor health, strangely enough, can be considered an economic bonus. Bad food, too much food and drink, might be tragic in health terms but when it comes to the economy it would seem that obesity pays.

Top Marx (Mark Seccombe)
In the second of these articles on the major schools of Economic thought, I am going to address one of the most controversial figures in Economics. Not least of the issues is the debate of whether Karl Marx should be considered an economist. Certainly, there are many aspects of his theory which involve Economics, but his ideas are so deeply integrated with his views on Politics, it can be difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. His contribution to Economics was made in the work ‘Das Kapital’. Only the first volume of which is Marx’s own work, he died after it was published and following volumes were written by his friend and benefactor; Friedrich Engels.

The case for a tax on dogs (Robert Nutter)
The Challenge the Chancellor competition this year asked students to suggest a new tax for the Chancellor to introduce in these times of huge fiscal deficits. It is highly doubtful that anyone, including the Chancellor, has thought of taxing dogs – man’s (and woman’s) best friend. Such a tax on dog ownership would raise relatively little revenue, involve significant set-up and running costs, be fairly regressive and probably turn out to be very unpopular. In short it would fail to meet quite a few of Adam Smith’s famous Canons of Taxation.