Tax reform

This draft paper looked at the then proposed introduction of a mechanism to impose a carbon price in Australia from 1 July 2012. (It has now been introduced and came into effect on 1 July.) It argues that the compensation package to ameliorate the impact of the carbon tax will prove illusory over time and will make the working class pay for the environmental degradation unleashed by the polluters in their pursuit of profit. Further, the pricing is too low now and into the foreseeable future to encourage a switch to renewables. It will instead lock in gas fired power stations for decades to come.

The term “harmful tax competition” has become endemic. It is taken as a tautology that competition among nations for the favors of multinational companies, using their tax systems as bait, is harmful. This is a view held even by those who believe competition to be an inherently good thing in most other areas of business. However, the nature of the harm is rarely analyzed, nor are the parties most harmed identified. This paper attempts to redress the balance. Using the case of technology-based US multinationals located in Ireland, it analyses the benefits and hazards to major stakeholders of tax rules that encourage multinationals to locate part of their operation offshore.I argue that tax competition, even that not considered harmful by the OECD, can damage not only the home country of the emigrating multinational, but also the host country gaining the investment, local communities and the environment.

How did the rate of central government tax revenue more than triple in (the post-Soviet republic of) Georgia over 2004-2007? This paper investigates fiscal state formation in Georgia using ethnographic fieldwork to document how the reformist government brought to power by the 2003 "Rose Revolution" impelled tax compliance using a set of tactics of anti-corruption, anti-tax evasion, individual accountability, and compromising information collected through extra-legal surveillance. The use of ethnographic methods to examine the recent and rapid process of state formation in Georgia is a departure from much of the extant literature on state formation, which is dominated by historical scholarship that examines relatively long-term processes of political and economic change culminating in the present state. In contrast, the approach taken here uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage to examine how the state is a process of continuous formation. The fast emergence of a historically unprecedented scale of tax compliance in Georgia was the result of the application of particular techniques of government that assembled micro-subjective dispositions into a macro-institutional process of revenue capture.

Did you know that every year in the United States individuals pay MILLIONS of dollars to the IRS in the form of taxes; that they could have kept in their bank accounts had they been made aware of the Tax Advantages Of Owning A Home Based Business?

"Income tax more than perhaps any tax is very elastic. Changes in the economy have a direct and visible impact on the revenue productivity of income tax. In a country like Tanzania where there has been a fast expanding base of economic activities for the past two decades as reflected through the GDP, the taxable potential for income tax is very high. Successful tax reforms to ensure that the tax system is capable of yielding sufficient revenue have been effected by the government. While there has been a noticeable change in the performance of income tax in Tanzania, it is questionable whether income tax has attained the desired level of revenue productivity. Instances of revenue success, where noticeable, tend to be associated with serious inequities in the sense that the tax burden is borne by a restricted pool of taxpayers.

The problem appears to be the approach to tax reform which places an excessive emphasis on the importance of expanding the tax base and reinforcing the administrative machinery. The relevance of tax elasticity on these reform measures in terms of revenue-reach is restricted in that they focus on exploiting existing revenue sources within that tax net. The revenue potential held by the increasing pool of above-subsistence income-earners outside the tax net is not realized. They remain largely untaxed on account of a poorly developed tax infrastructure which affects the ability to identify and assess potential taxpayers. This in part appears to explain the snail-pace success of income taxation in Tanzania.

There is an apparent and urgent need to shift the reform emphasis from tax base to taxpayers’ base expansion if meaningful revenue outcomes are to be realized. The paper endeavors to demonstrate the imperative of developing the tax infrastructure, a visibly missing dimension from the reform episodes in Tanzania. The paper is divided into three main parts. Part One introduces the subject. Part Two reviews the reach of the taxpayers’ base in a number of sampled countries, and the impact of the breadth of this base on revenue yield. Parts Three rehearses the reform episodes in Tanzania for a selected period, to establish the degree of emphasis the reforms have allocated to tax base and taxpayers’ base restructuring and to explain how this emphasis has impacted revenue generation.
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"Este artículo pretende contribuir, desde una perspectiva histórica económica, a la comprensión de las relaciones entre el fraude y las amnistías fiscales, prestando especial atención a la experiencia española. El trabajo examina las diferentes medidas de regularización implantadas para enfrentar o favorecer la evasión por las autoridades españolas en el último medio siglo.

This article contributes from an economic historical perspective to the understanding of the relationship between fraud and tax amnesties in the Spanish case. The paper examines different regularization measures implemented to address or facilitate evasion by Spanish authorities (1940-1990)."

"Kayıt dışı ekonomi günümüzde hemen her ülke bakımından büyük bir sorun olmaya devam etmektedir. Kayıt dışı ekonominin gerek vergi gelirleri, gerekse makroekonomik göstergeler üzerindeki olumsuz etkisi bilinmektedir. Bu bakımdan kayıt dışılığa yol açan nedenlerin iyi araştırılarak boyutlarının azaltılmaya çalışılması büyük önem taşımaktadır.

Nowadays informal economy continues to be a major problem for every country. Negative impacts of informal economy on both tax revenues and macroeconomic indicators are known. In this regard, investigating the causes of informality and attempting to reduce their size are of great importance."

"Although the UK Coalition government has a fondness for nudge policies and proclaims itself ‘the greenest government ever’, many policies are criticised or failing. In March 2011, the long intended
policy change from Airline Passenger Duty (APD) to Per Plane Tax (PPT) was dropped. Cited as ineffective at reducing aviation consumption in spite of ever-increasing fees, the APD is a transparent tax passed on to customers by airlines with immediacy, whereas the PPT would incentivise airlines to maximise capacity and therefore reduce emissions but would have purportedly breached the Convention on International Civil Aviation 1944 (Chicago Convention). This article discusses central criticisms of the APD, and looks to the 'Luftverkehrsteuergesetz' in Germany, the 'Taxe de l’aviation civile' in France and prospects for an EU Air Tax, to conclude that whilst there is a forward movement along three levels of decision-making (international, European and domestic), the speed and quantum of progress varies."