Targeting Cascading And Indirect Tax Design

This paper addresses two fundamental issues in indirect tax design. It first revisits the case for reduced rates on items especially important to the poor, establishing conditions under which even very crudely targeted spending measures better serve their interests. It then explores the welfare costs from cascading taxes, showing that these may actually be lower the wider the set of inputs that are taxed but, more to the point—and contrary to the common notion that “a low rate on a broad base” is always good tax policy—may plausibly be large even at a low nominal tax rate and with few stages of production.

This paper addresses two fundamental issues in indirect tax design. It first revisits the case for reduced rates on items especially important to the poor, establishing conditions under which even very crudely targeted spending measures better serve their interests. It then explores the welfare costs from cascading taxes, showing that these may actually be lower the wider the set of inputs that are taxed but, more to the point—and contrary to the common notion that “a low rate on a broad base” is always good tax policy—may plausibly be large even at a low nominal tax rate and with few stages of production.

The sizeable increase in income inequality experienced in advanced economies and many parts of the world since the 1990s and the severe consequences of the global economic and financial crisis have brought distributional issues to the top of the policy agenda. The challenge for many governments is to address concerns over rising inequality while simultaneously promoting economic efficiency and more robust economic growth. The book delves into this discussion by analyzing fiscal policy and its link with inequality. Fiscal policy is the government’s most powerful tool for addressing inequality. It affects households ‘consumption directly (through taxes and transfers) and indirectly (via incentives for work and production and the provision of public goods and individual services such as education and health). An important message of the book is that growth and equity are not necessarily at odds; with the appropriate mix of policy instruments and careful policy design, countries can in many cases achieve better distributional outcomes and improve economic efficiency. Country studies (on the Netherlands, China, India, Republic of Congo, and Brazil) demonstrate the diversity of challenges across countries and their differing capacity to use fiscal policy for redistribution. The analysis presented in the book builds on and extends work done at the IMF, and also includes contributions from leading academics.

This paper presents a novel approach to addressing VAT regressivity, by proposing the adoption of a progressive VAT: a single-rate, broad-base, VAT, whereby tax paid on consumption is re-paid to lower income households in real-time, at the moment of purchase. Such a system can effectively eliminate regressivity, while minimizing the political economy, cash-flow, and welfare stigma obstacles that are often associated with standard welfare transfers used in modern VAT systems. It would also have other significant advantages, particularly in terms of compliance incentives.

Growth in sub-Saharan Africa has weakened after more than a decade of solid growth, although this overall outlook masks considerable variation across the region. Some countries have been negatively affected by falling prices of their main commodity exports. Oil-exporting countries, including Nigeria and Angola, have been hit hard by falling revenues and the resulting fiscal adjustments, while middle-income countries such as Ghana, South Africa, and Zambia are also facing unfavorable conditions. This October 2015 report discusses the fiscal and monetary policy adjustments necessary for these countries to adapt to the new environment. Chapter 2 looks at competitiveness in the region, analyzing the substantial trade integration that accompanied the recent period of high growth, and policy actions to nurture new sources of growth. Chapter 3 looks at the implications for the region of persistently high income and gender inequality and ways to reduce them.

The Indian economy has recorded strong growth in recent years, helped by a large terms of trade gain, positive policy actions including implementation of key structural reforms, a return to normal monsoon rainfall, and reduced external vulnerabilities. Inflation has remained low after the collapse in global commodity prices, a range of supply-side measures, and a relatively tight monetary stance. Key macroeconomic challenges include persistently-high household inflation expectations and large fiscal deficits, which limit policy space for supporting growth through demand measures. Supply bottlenecks and structural impediments are the main constraints to medium-term growth and job creation.

Taxation and Development highlights the importance of better understanding the ways in which taxes and expenditure are linked. Focusing on developing countries, the book argues for a broader approach to the topic, with a secondary focus on developing a

Global Taxation investigates the global transition to modern taxation from the 18th century to today. Modern taxation refers to the broad-based tax instruments that allowed for the emergence of big government as we know it today, including, most prominently, income taxes and general consumption taxes. The volume draws on a new historical dataset of tax introduction worldwide to map the global spread of modern taxes descriptively and to explore its correlates analytically. It makes four contributions to the literature. First, it corrects a pervasive Western bias in historical political economy and fiscal sociology. Most of this literature focuses heavily on the tax policy of advanced democracies in Europe. The chapters of this volume explore how far Western theories and insights travel to non-Western contexts. Second, the volume mitigates a recency bias in much of the macro-quantitative literature in comparative political economy and public finance. The chapters investigate whether insights travel across time from recent to more distant periods of observation. Third, the volume compensates for the substantive preoccupation of extant research with the personal income tax and the VAT by extending the analysis to other important tax instruments: the corporate income tax, the inheritance tax, non-VAT sales taxes, and social security contributions. Finally, the volume goes beyond the prevalent methodological nationalism in fiscal sociology and comparative political economy. It shows that non-sovereign tax introductions were common in colonial and imperial settings and compares analytically how the logic of these non-sovereign introductions differed from sovereign ones.