Modelling Indirect Taxes And Tax Reform

Indirect taxes have become an increasingly important revenue-raising tool for governments in developed countries. In this book, John Creedy applies his wealth of experience and expertise to the analysis of indirect taxes and, in particular, concentrates on the modelling of indirect tax reform and its distributional implications.

Governments need to know how much revenue their tax systems will raise, who will pay tax and what the effects on the incentives to save, work and invest will be. This book draws on the experience of tax modelling in western European economies and economies in transition to show the range of techniques involved from 'back of the envelope' calculations to sophisticated econometrics. Personal and corporate income taxes are considered, as well as the essential task of developing an appropriate database.

This book develops a number of analytical models and presents empirical analyses of the equity and efficiency effects of existing indirect taxes from New Zealand. Potential tax reforms including environmental taxes are also examined and the methods presented can easily be adapted to deal with other countries. Policy debates are inevitably influenced by value judgements, which are seldom made explicit either by governments or those engaging in public discussion. By concentrating on the empirical orders of magnitude, and by examining the implications of adopting alternative value judgements, the findings of this book contribute towards rational policy debate, rather than relying on guesswork and rhetoric. The equity and efficiency effects of indirect taxes are examined in detail, using the central concepts of welfare changes, the excess burden of taxation, and money metric utility measures. The indirect taxes examined include a carbon tax designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Distributional Effects of Indirect Taxes develops widely applicable models and will therefore appeal to economists interested in public economics, tax policy, inequality measurement, welfare economics and tax modelling. Economists in government departments and international agencies interested in public finance and inequality and poverty measurement will also find much to engage them in this book, as will policymakers concerned with indirect and environmental tax policy, inequality, and welfare economics.

Around the world, there are concerns that many tax codes are biased against women, and that contemporary tax reforms tend to increase the incidence of taxation on the poorest women while failing to generate enough revenue to fund the programs needed to improve these women's lives. Because taxes are the key source of revenue governments themselves raise, understanding the nature and composition of taxation and current tax reform efforts is key to reducing poverty, providing sufficient revenue for public expenditure, and achieving social justice. This is the first book to systematically examine gender and taxation within and across countries at different levels of development. It presents original research on the gender dimensions of personal income taxes, and value-added, excise, and fuel taxes in Argentina, Ghana, India, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Uganda and the United Kingdom. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers studying Public Finance, International Economics, Development Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations, among other disciplines.

This book demonstrates how the reliable measurement of growth in tax revenues, both for a tax system and for its component taxes, is important for the design of tax policy. The need for discretionary changes in tax parameters (such as tax rates, income thresholds and allowances) is conditional on the expected automatic revenue growth generated by the tax system. The properties that generate these automatic revenue changes are referred to as the built-in flexibility, or revenue responsiveness, of the tax. This concept is the central focus of the analyses in this book, which provides an invaluable review and synthesis of analytical results and demonstrates how this concept can be applied in practice to yield estimates of revenue responsiveness in various countries. John Creedy and Norman Gemmell highlight how an understanding of the principal determinants of a tax system's responsiveness, and a knowledge of the relevant magnitudes, are important for the design and reform of tax policy where both revenue and redistributional considerations are typically central to the policy agenda. Providing extensions of analysis to cover indirect taxes, and direct and indirect taxes combined, as well as empirical applications for several countries, Modelling Tax Revenue Growth will be warmly welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in public finance and government officials and those in international organisations interested in tax revenue growth.

Alberto Heimler and Daniele Meulders In the last decade the modelling of the interrelationship between public finance and the rest of the economy has seen substantial advances, reflected in many of the papers delivered to the Applied Econometrics Association Conference held at Confindustria, Rome, on 30 November and 1 December 1989. In particular, the development of the literature on applied general-equilibrium modelling has found most of its applications in the field of taxation, enlarging and completing the estimation of the welfare loss due to distortionary taxes. In this context an important extension has been the introduction of overlapping-generation models. Furthermore, it has become clear that most individual decisions, especially the decision whether or not to work, are dependent upon the tax system, in the sense that the higher the marginal income tax the larger the wedge between labour cost and take-home pay, the last one being the decision variable in the demand for leisure. Finally, in the European context, the completion of the internal market has brought about the necessity to harmonize fiscal systems in the EEC member countries. A number of papers study, therefore, the effects of fiscal reform on efficiency, welfare and growth.

G. Galeotti* and M. Marrelli** *Universita di Perugia **Universita di Napoli 1. The economic analysis of optimal taxation has permitted considerable steps to be taken towards the understanding of a number of problems: the appropriate degree of progression, the balance between different taxes, the equity-efficiency trade-off etc .. Though at times considered as abstract and of little use in policy design, the issues it addresses are real ones and very much on the agenda of many countries. As usual in scientific debate, criticisms have contributed to the correct understanding of the theoretical problems involved and made clear that, at the present state of the art, definitive conclusions may be premature. A first well-taken criticism addresses the assumption, underlying optimal taxation models, of a competitive economy with perfect information on the part of individual agents and full market clearing. Once we leave the Arrow-Debreu world, it is no longer necessarily the case that taxes and transfers introduce distortions on otherwise efficient allocations.