Tobin tax

Tobin tax, proposed tax on short-term currency transactions. A Tobin tax is designed to deter only speculative flows of hot money—money that moves regularly between financial markets in search of high short-term interest rates. It is not meant to impact long-term investments. The shorter the investment cycle (i.e., the time between buying and selling a currency), the higher the effective rate of tax—thus providing market-based incentives for lengthening the term structure of investments.

Although they may be known by other names, such taxes tend to be named for the American economist James Tobin, who first popularized the idea of a levy on currency transactions in the early 1970s. Tobin, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1981, subsequently distanced himself from the campaign that typically bears his name, arguing that campaigners were right to support a currency transactions tax but that they were doing so for the wrong reasons. Multiple reasons are usually cited for introducing such a tax, and, while Tobin concentrated on the economic justifications for taxing speculative flows of hot money, others subsequently focused instead on the positive global causes that could be financed from the revenue from the tax.

Since the daily turnover on foreign exchange markets is so out of proportion compared with all other forms of economic activity, even the tiniest currency transactions tax would raise huge sums of money. Those who advocate implementation of such a tax for social reasons argue that it would provide a means of global redistribution, enabling poverty to be tackled at the source. Despite concerns about the viability of enforcing the tax, its revenue would allow any number of development goals to be met. In addition, a Tobin tax would also act as a defense mechanism against destabilizing speculation within the foreign exchange market. As the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s proved so conclusively, whole economic systems can fall prey to the effects of momentum trading, whereby the loss of confidence in a currency can lead to wholesale economic collapse.

However, neither of these were Tobin’s reason for supporting the imposition of a currency transactions tax. Tobin’s concern was that policy makers should be able to determine policy in a context that is undisturbed by flows of hot money destabilizing the domestic currency. The tax therefore represents a means of reactivating a sphere of autonomous policy making. Tobin tailored his argument primarily to the position encountered by developing countries. He wished to see developing countries integrated more fully into the dynamics of international trade, and using public policy to reduce speculation against their currencies assisted this goal. At the time that Tobin was writing, in the second half of the 20th century, speculative pressures against the currencies of developing countries proved particularly difficult to resist, which added a considerable degree of exchange rate risk into, and hence undermined, their trading relationships with other countries.

Eichengreen, B., Tobin, J., & Wyplosz, C. Two cases for sand in the wheels of international finance. Economic Journal 105 162–172 (1995).

Tobin, J. A proposal for international monetary reform. Eastern Economic Journal 4 153–159 (1978).

Weaver, J., Dodd, R., & Baker, J. (Eds.). (2003). Debating the Tobin tax: New rules for global finance. Washington, DC: New Rules for Global Finance Coalition.