Host country government officials in developing and developed countries alike would like to know the impact of their public policies on foreign investment in their countries. Unfortunately, the literature does not provide a single view, and there are likely to be differences between developing...

There is a large literature documenting that high host-country corporate taxes deter foreign direct investment. However, some recent papers have questioned the robustness of this result in developing countries. In this paper we investigate one possible reason: the presence of a trade-off between...

This paper attempts to broaden the existing empirical literature on foreign direct investment by incorporating government expenditure policies, such as investment in infrastructure, and institutional factors that may impact business investment, such as corruption, along with other conventional...

This paper attempts to broaden the existing empirical literature on foreign direct investment by incorporating government expenditures (both investment in infrastructure and consumption) as well as tax, classical location factors, institutional factors that may hinder business investment (such...

In this paper, we use pooled data for central-provincial and provincial-local governments in 2000-01, overall involving over 4000 sub-provincial governments, to assess China 's sub-national fiscal equalization practices and outcomes. Our goal is to explain horizontal fiscal disparities between...

This paper attempts to broaden the existing empirical literature on foreign direct investment by incorporating government expenditures (both investment in infrastructure and consumption) as well as tax, classical location factors, institutional factors that may hinder business investment (such...

This paper analyzes the effect of urbanization on the poverty level. Our theoretical model suggests a U-shape relationship between the level of urbanization and poverty. Urbanization contributes to poverty reduction but at much higher levels, urbanization leads to increases in poverty....

This paper analyzes the main design issues for utilizing capital transfers with an equalization objective within a system of sub-national finance. Although there is a vast literature and ample policy practice with the design of equalization grants involving needs for recurrent expenditures...

One of the oldest questions in the theory and practice of taxation is that of the appropriate mix of direct and indirect taxes. The choice between direct and indirect taxes has contributed to a long animated debate, in political and academic circles, regarding the virtues and defects of those...

We use detailed micro-level data on consumption and income for a 1998-2004 panel of Russian households to study the effects of the flat income tax reform in 2001. We show that the gap between household expenditures and reported income is a meaningful measure of tax evasion. We use the...