Curbing Inflation Through Taxation

"Symposium conducted by the Tax Institute, February 7-8, 1944, New York, N.Y."--T.p.

This paper investigates the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in OECD economies. We examine the historical record, including Budget Speeches and IMFdocuments, to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by responding to prospective economic conditions. Using this new dataset, our estimates suggest fiscal consolidation has contractionary effects on private domestic demand and GDP. By contrast, estimates based on conventional measures of the fiscal policy stance used in the literature support the expansionary fiscal contractions hypothesis but appear to be biased toward overstating expansionary effects.

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Excess wages tax (EWT) is a tax-based incomes policy instrument introduced in many centrally-planned economies and still used in some FSU and Eastern European countries in transition. The main macroeconomic goal of EWT is to curb inflationary pressures by penalizing through taxation the “excessive” wage awards granted by enterprises in the course of wage and price liberalization. In this paper, effects of EWT on the behavior of a profit-maximizing enterprise under monopsony, its incidence on wages and profits, and its impact on inflation are analyzed. The effect of EWT on an enterprise that maximizes workers’ income is also examined with some observations on EWT’s impact on managerial behavior. Finally, recent experience with EWT is assessed and compared to that suggested by the model.