Ensuring operational compliance and ethical responsibility in the regulation of ART: the HFEA, past, present, and future

Under the Public Bodies Bill 2010, the HFEA, cornerstone in the regulation of assisted reproduction technologies (ART) for the last twenty years, is due to be abolished. This implies that there is no longer a need for a dedicated regulator for ART and that the existing roles of the Authority as both operational compliance monitor, and instance of ethical evaluation, may be absorbed by existing healthcare regulators. This article presents a timely analysis of these disparate functions of the HFEA, charting reforms adopted in 2008 and assessing the impact of the current proposals. Taking assisted conception treatment as the focus activity, it will be shown that the last few years have seen a concentration on the HFEA as a technical regulator based upon the principles of Better Regulation, with little analysis of how the ethical responsibility of the Authority fits into this framework. The current proposal to abolish the HFEA continues to fail to address this crucial question. Notwithstanding the fact that the scope of the Authority's ethical role may be questioned, its abolition requires that the Government consider what alternatives exists - or need to be put in place - to provide both responsive operational regulation and a forum for ethical reflection and decision-making in an area which continues to pose regulatory challenges

Who owned Earls Colne in 1798....or how to squeeze more from the Land Tax

In this important article Richard Hoyle, one of the country’s leading historians of the early modern period, introduces new perspectives on the Land Tax and its use in the analysis of local communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He uses as his case study the parish of Earls Colne in Essex, on which he has already written extensively with Professor Henry French. The article begins with an overview of the tax itself, explaining its history and the procedures for the collection of revenues – including the numerous changes which took place. The sizeable problems confronting any would-be analyst of the data are clearly identified, and Hoyle observes that because of these apparently insoluble difficulties the potential of the tax returns has never been fully realised. He then considers the surviving documentation in The National Archives, providing an accessible introduction to the sources and their arrangement, and describing the particularly important question o f the redemption of the tax by payment of a lump sum. The extent of redemption (in the years around 1800-1804) is discussed. Hoyle draws attention to the potential for linking the tax returns themselves with the redemption certificates (which have never been subjected to historical analysis and thereby proposes new ways of exploiting the evidence of the taxation as a whole. The article then discusses in detail the specific case of Earls Colne, with tabulated data showing the research potential. Topics analysed include the ownership of property ranked by size of payment, and calculations whereby the amount paid may be used to determine the worth of land and the structure of individual estates. The important question of absentee owners is investigated, and there is a very valuable consideration of the potential for looking at portfolio estate ownership, whereby owners held land in varying proportions in a number of parishes. It is suggested that such studies will allow us to be more aware of the entirety of property ownership, which a focus on a single community does not permit. In the concluding paragraph it is argued that using these sources we may see the rise and fall of estates, gain new information on landownership, landholding and farm size, and even approach the challenging topic of the distribution of wealth.

Asymmetric oligopoly and foreign direct investment: implications for host-country tax-setting

We present a duopoly model with heterogeneous firms that vary in cost-efficiency, each of which can choose to serve a foreign market by either exporting or local production. We do so to analyse the effects of a host-country corporate profit tax on both the scale and composition of FDI, and find that: strategic interaction between oligopolistic firms provides for a pattern of FDI that favours cost-inefficiency to the detriment of host-country welfare; and the host-country tax rate can be optimally used to avoid such patterns of FDI and instead promote direct investment by a relatively cost-efficient firm.

Tax principles, product differentiation and the nature of competition

We analyze the choice between the origin and destination principles of taxation when there is product differentiation and Bertrand competition. If taxes are redistributed to consumers and demand is linear the origin principle dominates the destination principle whatever the degree of product differentiation and extent of economic integration. With nonlinear demand the origin principle dominates if there is sufficient economic integration. When the social value assigned to tax revenue is higher than the private value, the destination principle dominates for intermediate values of product differentiation and economic integration. The same results are also shown to hold with Cournot competition.

The structure of the optimal income tax in the quasi-linear model

Existing numerical characterizations of the optimal income tax have been based on a limited number of model specifications. As a result, they do not reveal which properties are general. We determine the optimal tax in the quasi-linear model under weaker assumptions than have previously been used; in particular, we remove the assumption of a lower bound on the utility of zero consumption and the need to permit negative labor incomes. A Monte Carlo analysis is then conducted in which economies are selected at random and the optimal tax function constructed. The results show that in a significant proportion of economies the marginal tax rate rises at low skills and falls at high. The average tax rate is equally likely to rise or fall with skill at low skill levels, rises in the majority of cases in the centre of the skill range, and falls at high skills. These results are consistent across all the specifications we test. We then extend the analysis to show that these results also hold for Cobb-Douglas utility.

Revenue-neutral tax policy under price uncertainty

The firm's response to revenue-neutral taxation is investigated under price uncertainty. Revenue-neutral policies adjust simultaneously the marginal tax rate and the level of exemptions while keeping expected tax receipts constant. Nonincreasing absolute risk aversion is sufficient to sign the firm's response: a reduction in the marginal rate causes the firm to contract output. Implications are established for the equilibrium level of treasury receipts.

Revenue-neutral tax policies under price uncertainty: reply

In their comment on my 1990 article, Yeh, Suwanakul, and Mai extend my analysis-which focused attention exclusively on firm output-to allow for simultaneous endogeneity of price, aggregate output, and numbers of firms. They show that, with downward- sloping demand, industry output adjusts positively to revenue-neutral changes in the marginal rate of taxation. This result is significant for two reasons. First, we are more often interested in predictions about aggregate phenomena than we are in predictions about individual firms. Indeed, firm-level predictions are frequently irrefutable since firm data are often unavailable. Second, the authors derive their result under a set of conditions that appear to be more general than those invoked in my 1990 article. In particular, they circumvent the need to invoke specific assumptions about the nature of firms' aversions toward risk. I consider this a useful extension and I appreciate the careful scrutiny of my paper.

Budget constrained tax policy under price uncertainty: implications for supply control

Tax policies that constrain net transfers between the farm sector and the fisc are modeled under price uncertainty. Increasing the level of tax on profits causes the firm to expand output. Implications are derived for supply control and the distributions of profits and net receipts at the fisc.