Introduction

Shifting the global economy towards sustainability

Making Money Our Servant Rather Than Our Master

Right Livelihood

Social enterprise

Legal and Financial Issues

Key Proposed Incremental Reforms

Aside from the comprehensive proposals for radical reform of how the global economy works – Contraction & Convergence, Tradable Energy Quotas, the Oil Depletion Protocol and Environmental Keynsianism – a number of more incremental reforms have been proposed.

Many of these focus on the use of ‘greening’ taxation as a mechanism to ‘internalise’ the ecological externalities associated with industrial production systems.

Proposals include the transfer of most tax from people to resource use.  Interestingly, this is very much in accord with classical economic theory which suggests that the weight of taxation should be placed on the scarcest factor of production (traditionally defined as land, labour and capital), thus encouraging investment in and greater use of more plentiful economic resources. 

The situation today, where a heavy weight of taxation lands directly or indirectly on people, is a legacy of the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when labour was in relatively scarce supply. Today, it is clear that the scarcest 'resource' is natural capital - that is, the availability of resources such as topsoil and valuable metals and minerals, and the ability of the atmosphere to absorb our wastes.

Since this is clearly our most scare resource, classical economic theory suggests that this is where most taxation should be applied.  Were taxation to be shifted away from people and towards resource use, labour would become relatively cheaper at the same time as economic activities associated with heavy resource use and pollution would become relatively more expensive.  This would render small-scale, locally-based, labour-intensive production processes more competitive.

Some other reforms that have been proposed are:

• the phasing out of subsidies on environmentally wasteful and unsustainable activities and their replacement with subsidies on community- and ecosystem-nurturing activities
• the introduction of a tax on land
• the creation of a citizen’s income
• the annulment of outstanding international debt
• the replacement of key international economic bodies (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation)
• the introduction of a tax on international currency transactions (Tobin Tax)

• Macro-level proposals
• Key proposed incremental reforms

Scales of environmental justice
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Green taxes
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