Abstract
Seventy percent of our country’ s land is occupied by forest. Functions of forest cover not only CO2 reduction but also water source cultivation, conservation of biodiversity, prevention of sediment-related disasters, and so on. Forest conservation is an urgent policy issue for Japan.
Aichi Prefecture Toyota City was the first municipality to implement the forest reservation policy. Since 1994, Toyota City runs a tap water conservation fund to accumulate 1 yen per 1 m 3 of water usage. In 2003, Kochi Prefecture, followed by other prefectures, established a forest environmental tax as a poll tax. Furthermore, the national government is similarly planning to introduce a forest environment tax in 2024.
Preceding studies on forest environmental taxes have so far mostly focused on the background of the policies, survey on actual condition, and comparisons with overseas cases. Therefore, in this paper, we consider Toyota City’s taxation elaboration and the forest environmental tax based on efficiency in resource allocation.
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Acknowledgments
The authors highly appreciate financial supports from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), 18 K01631) and Chukyo University Institute of Economics (P15002).
This paper is an extended version of Nakayama et al. (2016) and Nakayama and Shirai (2009). We are grateful to the Toyota City Waterworks Bureau that provided the materials for this study.
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Nakayama, K., Shirai, M., Yamada, M. (2019). Effects of Environmental Taxes on Forest Conservation: Case of the Water Resources Conservation Fund in Toyota City. In: Nakayama, K., Miyata, Y. (eds) Theoretical and Empirical Analysis in Environmental Economics. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives, vol 34. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2363-8_4
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