We investigate how large a size of primary deficit to GDP ratio the Japan’s government can sustain. For this investigation, we construct an overlapping generations model, in which multi-generational households live and the government maintains a constant ratio of primary deficit to GDP. We...

To understand the cyclical movements of value-added tax (VAT) revenues in advanced economies, this paper analyzes changes in the C-efficiency ratio by decomposing it into changes in the compliance and policy gaps between 2000 and 2014. The results from a panel of EU member countries and Japan...

The authors point to the difficulty of assessing fiscal sustainability when revenues fluctuate sharply and unexpectedly. They note that in recent years tax revenues in Japan have been considerably unstable, so it is no longer appropriate to calculate the amount of structural tax revenue using a...

The IMF Fiscal Affairs Department's Revenue Administration Gap Analysis Program (RA-GAP) aims to provide a quantitative analysis of the tax gap between potential revenues and actual collections, and this technical note explains the concept of the tax gap for corporate income tax (CIT), and the...