Kindred Winecoff (IPE at UNC) responded on Monday to an op-ed by Dani Rodrik, which advocated the Tobin Tax once more. This was in turn a response to the comments made by Adair Turner in last month’s Prospect and briefly discussed here at Davos to Seattle. (See also comments by the German finance minister). Kindred was sceptical, stating that:
if the tax is successful in limiting cross-national transactions (“throwing some sand in the wheels of international finance”), then the revenue from the tax will be less significant. Only if large, frequent, cross-national flows persist will the revenue come in, and if that happens then the other goal of the Tobin tax (protection from “hot money” flows) will be betrayed.
This is fair enough as far as it goes, but I’d suggest that the second goal is more important than the first. Indeed, I’d always interpreted the first goal as simply the means to achieve the second goal, rather than an end in its own right.
Additionally, I’d question what’s meant by “large” in this context. Obviously the Tobin Tax would have a minimum threshold so that it didn’t apply to the average holidaymaker at the Bureau de Change. But the limiting of large cross-national flows needn’t necessarily mean the tax would be utterly ineffective, as it would still apply to plenty of smaller (though still large in comparison to holidaymakers’) commercial transactions. It could raise significant money from such exchanges, even if the biggest “hot money” flows were limited. There’s an ideal equilibrium point to be found.
The post at IPE at UNC also argues that:
Rodrik says that a small Tobin tax would raise “hundreds of billions” worldwide. Presumably these will used on all sorts of really great projects that everyone loves (he lists “foreign aid, vaccines, green technologies, you name it”). But the vast majority of these taxes will be recouped by the countries with the biggest financial sectors (who receive the most inflows): the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan. In essence, then, we would be taxing investors from poorer countries in order to redistribute to citizens of richer countries.
I’m willing to be corrected, but my understanding had always been that the Tobin Tax would be raised nationally, but pooled, administered and (re)distributed at a global level and then spent on projects of “net global benefit”.
So while the Tobin Tax is certainly not ‘the answer’, it might well be an answer. At the least, it has the potential to become a progressive and effective tool in global economic governance. The strange thing is that however much it might irk the city and financial institutions, the Tobin Tax is an idea that never quite seems to go away. Its simplicity and elegance, together with the fact that it’s not a tax that (directly) impacts much on the ordinary citizen make it perennially popular. One gets the feeling that however much structural power is wielded by those who stand to lose by it, every idea that manages to be both good and popular at the same time will have its time come eventually.
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