"Switzerland has a tradition of decentralised government, decentralised tax setting and direct reference to the voters through referendums. Such mechanisms should give rise to lower taxes, better provision of public goods and higher economic growth. However, these mechanisms have not been...

The Index of Fiscal Decentralisation (IFD) could be a very helpful quantitative instrument while radical changes in European organisation are just now coming. The IFD permits a comparison between fifteen European countries (including Switzerland). It is based on five variables indicative of the...

Switzerland provides a potential laboratory for testing various hypotheses connected with tax competition because of its extremely decentralized fiscal system. Twenty-six cantons (some of them extremely small) have retained the ultimate power of deciding tax questions, and hence not only to...

This article points to the highly centralized nature of the British tax system. A first section shows how all tax law derives from Parliament, the “onlie begetter” of legally enforceable instruments. It is suggested that this system is not democratically accountable at sub-national levels of...