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Tax Policy for Developing Countries
Discusses important tax policy issues facing developing countries today, provides a review of the role of tax incentives, and identifies some policy challenges posed by the globalization of the world economy. Draws on country cases.
Taxing the Financial Sector
One of the most complex issues in tax policy today is the treatment of the institutions, products, and services that make up the financial sector. It can be harder to ascertain income, expenses, and profits for financial firms than for firms selling goods and services, and it is easier for individuals and firms to manipulate financial transactions so as to exploit tax loopholes. This volume explores the challenges faced by tax policymakers and identifies modern best practices in several areas: banks, insurance companies, securities companies, investment funds, pension funds, and derivatives.
Human Capital Accumulation and Public Sector Growth
The present paper takes a fresh theoretical and empirical look into the relationship between Wagner’s law and economic development. It introduces human capital into a classic two-sector model of unbalanced growth. It shows that, as an economy develops, changes in the relative returns to human capital and unskilled labor, as a result of changes to their relative scarcities, could have a significant impact on the size of the government sector, depending in part also on the difference in relative factor intensities between outputs of the private and government sectors. This conjecture is broadly supported by empirical evidence based on a cross-section analysis of a large sample of developed and developing countries.
Fiscal Policy and Long-Run Growth
This paper discusses in a systematic and comprehensive way the existing literature on the relationship between the growth of countries’ economies and various public finance instruments, such as tax policy, expenditure policy, and overall budgetary policy, from the perspectives of allocative efficiency, macroeconomic stability, and income distribution. It reviews both the conceptual linkages between each of the instruments and growth and the empirical evidence on such relationships. It broadly concludes that fiscal policy could play a fundamental role in affecting the long-run growth performance of countries.
Taxation and the Household Saving Rate
This paper analyzes anew the relationship between taxation and the household saving rate. On the basis of standard savings and tax revenue data from, it provides compelling and robust empirical evidence of a powerful impact of taxes on household savings. In particular, income taxes are shown to affect negatively the household saving rate much more than consumption taxes.
Consequences of the Economic and Monetary Union for the Coordination of Tax Systems in the European Union
With the advent of the economic and monetary union in the European Union (EU), the economic landscape of the EU will bear a striking resemblance to that of the United States in terms of fundamental attributes such as the freedom of internal movements of individuals, capital, and goods within the union, as well as the adoption of a common currency. This paper examines developments in the tax systems of the states in the United States and draws lessons for the need of coordination of EU tax systems.
Inequality and Optimal Redistributive Tax and Transfer Policies
This paper explores the revenue-raising aspect of progressive taxation and derives, on the basis of a simple model, the optimal degree of tax progressivity where the tax revenue is used exclusively to finance (perfectly) targeted transfers to the poor. The paper shows that not only would it be optimal to finance the targeted transfers with progressive taxation, but that the optimal progressivity increases unambiguously with growing income inequality. This conclusion holds up under different assumptions about the efficiency cost of taxation and society’s aversion to inequality.
Taxation and Unemployment
This paper reviews conceptual linkages between taxation and unemployment, available empirical evidence and country policies that may have a bearing on these linkages in the OECD and in a sample of developing and transitional economies, Fund policy advice on these issues, and tax policy options in addressing the unemployment problem. It concludes that the emphasis in policy should be placed on minimizing tax distortions, rather than on formulating activist tax policies to reduce unemployment.
Welfare Cost of (Low) Inflation
This paper provides general equilibrium estimates of the steady-state welfare gains of lowering inflation from a low level to close to price stability, using an overlapping-generations growth model. Money demand is modeled on the basis that real money balances are a factor of production. Assuming a standard Fisher equation modified by the presence of an income tax, it is found that inflation unambiguously reduces capital intensity, drives up the before-tax real rate of return to capital, and unambiguously imposes a life-time welfare cost. This welfare cost is, however, quantitatively very modest (under 0.2 percent of GDP annually) within reasonable ranges of all parameter values.
A Superior Hybrid Cash-Flow Tax on Corporations
This paper proposes a new hybrid cash-flow tax on corporations that, on one hand, taxes only excess corporate profits as they accrue, and, on the other hand, treats real and financial transactions neutrally. It is, therefore, a superior tax compared to the cash-flow tax on real transactions that seems to have gained common acceptance. The hybrid tax is a modified version of the cash-flow tax on real and financial transactions combined. The modification involves replacing expensing of fixed assets with normal depreciation allowances, but the undepreciated value of fixed assets is carried forward with interest at the opportunity cost of equity capital.
