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Pigouvian taxes are named after English economist Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959), who also developed the concept of economic externalities. William Baumol was instrumental in framing Pigou's work in modern economics in 1972. [3]
Arthur Cecil Pigou (/ ˈ p iː ɡ uː /; 18 November 1877 – 7 March 1959) was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge , he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world.
Related efforts to achieve socially optimal quantities of externalities have long been a focus of microeconomic research, most famously by Ronald Coase [1] and Arthur Pigou. [2] Externality problems persist despite past remedies, which makes newer approaches such as the efficient voter rule important.
Pigou expanded upon Marshall's ideas and introduced the concept of "Pigovian taxes" or corrective taxes aimed at internalizing externalities by aligning private costs with social costs. His work emphasized the role of government intervention in addressing market failures resulting from externalities.
Pigou developed the concept of externalities in 1920 through ‘The Economics of Welfare’. [5] Essentially, Pigou argued negative externalities (spillover) of an activity should incur an extra cost or tax while activities that produce a positive externalities (spillover) should be subsidized to further encourage this activity.
A.C. Pigou (1877-1959). One of the achievements for which the great English economist A.C. Pigou is known, was his work on the divergences between marginal private costs and marginal social costs (externalities). In his book, The Economics of Welfare (1932), Pigou describes how these divergences come about:
By taxing goods with negative externalities, the government attempts to increase economic efficiency while raising revenues. This type of tax is called a Pigovian tax, after economist Arthur Pigou who wrote about it in his 1920 book "The Economics of Welfare". [56]
The Pigou Club is described by its creator, economist Gregory Mankiw, as a “group of economists and pundits with the good sense to have publicly advocated higher Pigouvian taxes, such as gasoline taxes or carbon taxes." [1] A Pigouvian tax is a tax levied to correct the negative externalities (negative side-effects) of a market activity.